About

Zoe works  from her studio in Shropshire  (UK)

Zoe Whiteside MA (RCA)

 Zoe studied at the Royal College of Art and Staffordshire University. She has worked from studios in London, Brighton and Gothenburg (Sweden). Examples of her work have been exhibited at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Ruthin Craft Centre Wales and Ceramic Art London.

"My work is a celebration of the animal with influence being drawn from Staffordshire figures, T'ang sculptures and Antiquity. More recently I have returned to narrative and metaphor, focussing on horses, bears, dogs and elephants. I try to capture the spirit of the animal with my slab building techniques and also mould making as part of the process. I mix and formulate my own glazes and slips which are hand painted and fired to achieve subtleties in surface texture and colour."
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A grainy black and white photograph of a small child sitting astride a rhinoceros, taken some ears ago, is an image which Zoe Whiteside returns to time and time again. It stands as a sort of totem of humankind's relationship with the animal world. In this picture, the child jubilantly raises her arms, and the rhino, far from appearing cowed, has its head lifted, gazing upwards and forwards, apparently enjoying the relationship. The image is open to a wide range of meanings, referring as it does to the symbiotic relationship between animals and humanity, but for Whiteside its significance lies in its optimistic and positive mood, qualities which are, she says, a vital part of her work. Zoe Whiteside is part of the growing number of artists working in clay who model animals. After years of neglect, the animal world has become a fascinating and legitimate area, challenging artists to do tar more than focus on external appearance but to aim to get beneath the skin, to tell us more about the animalness of creatures who have existed alongside humankind for thousands of years. Animals in sculpture have been imbued with many meanings, ranging from heavily symbolic such as Leighton's python evoking the threat of engulfing sexuality, to the saccharine whimsicality of Bambi and the world of Walt Disney. Such considerations have little importance for Whiteside who shys away from pyschobabble in favour of a more physical relationship with animals, more concerned with how they are structured, the way they stand, and how one part informs the other rather than what they signify. Like many artists working with clay, Whiteside approached her chosen area slowly. As a student on a two year B lech art foundation course in Basingstoke there was plenty of encouragement and opportunities for experiment. Although torn between glass and clay, it was the tactile direct quality of clay which finally caught her imagination because it could be handled, as opposed to glass which could onlv be manipulated with tools. It was the possibility of working with both clay and glass which prompted the choice of Stoke for her degree, as the course offered the option of working with both materials, but again it was the clay which won, and by the second year she had started to model animals. Interestingly, this grew from wanting to decorate a pot with a design of a monkey, and slowly the monkey turned into a relief until it became an object independent of the vessel. Ever since Whiteside has continued to explore the animal kingdom. 
At Stoke there was time to visit the excellent museum where the variety and range of animals modelled by potters continued to impress her. These ranged from Staffordshire nineteenth century flat-backs to the highly stylised Tang horses and camels in their shiny glazes and rich colour. Inspired, Whiteside finished some of her animals with richly coloured glazes, a technique she has temporarily abandoned in favour of matt surfaces obtained through the use of softly coloured slips. There was also an involvement with environmental issues prompting Whiteside to become a vegetarian. One series of her pieces at Stoke were models of circus elephants placed on plinths. These were misinterpreted by animal rights enthusiasts, alerting Whiteside to the sensitivity of her chosen subiect matter. Following Stoke came two years at the Royal College of Art, an experience which though continually challenging her to question what she was doing, seemed to offer little that seemed positive, and after she had left she felt she had to find herself again. For the final show at the RCA she focused on three animals - a bull seen regularly in a field in Stoke, a cat and a Staffordshire bull terrier both belonging to members of the family - each of which was rendered in a completely different style. It caused her something of an identity crisis, and for some time it was necessary to go to ground to re-establish herself. For a year she worked in a tiny studio in Shepherds Bush, London. This offered cheap accommodation but with a kiln little more than a foot cube, it restricted the size of her pieces. Though limiting in many was it proved to be a useful framework, and here Whiteside began to develop her familiar vocabulary of modelled animals, all constructed rather like the animals themselves on a sort of skeleton structure with the skin of clay made up from large slabs or smaller pieces placed over it to conceal but suggest the structure lying beneath. From London Whiteside moved to Coventry some three years ago and a larger studio. With the help of a Crafts Council setting up grant she acquired equipment and a kiln which enables her to fire creatures up to 36" high. Potting is combined with part time teaching at Liverpool Hope University on a broad-based three dimensional design course.
Like any artist working from life, Whiteside is continually making reference to the creatures themselves. In London there was the opportunity to spend time at London Zoo, and see at first hand elephants and rhinoceros, two of her favourite animals. The rhino, graceful and strong despite its great bulk, remains a challenge she enjoys. Other animals, though less exotic and more domestic, such as goats, dogs and horses, are also the subiect of her work, each portraved with an air of independence and dignity. 
With deft skill Whiteside avoids any hint of sentimentality, while capturing the sense of the animal created in clay. Such qualities are beautifully captured in her drawings, carried out confidently with soft pencil, which describe the shape and contours of the animal. Such drawings lying casually on her table when I visited and smudged with clay, are the functional working drawings of an artist analysing the subject and rendering it in two dimensional form before creating it in three. For Whiteside, they are an essential part of the process of both looking at animals and coming to terms with what and who they are.
One of Whiteside's often consulted books is Peter Beard's The End of the Game' (Thames and Hudson) of photographs of dead animals and endangered species. The graphic all too real imager disturbs cozy notions of sweetness and sentiment in favour of a gritty reality which seeks to alert us to facts rather than fantasies. Such images encourage Whiteside in her aim of celebrating the qualities and characteristics of the world of animals, enabl ing us to see again the strength, power and beauty of creatures whose mustery never fails to engage our imagination.

Other Activities
Zoe has also lectured & engaged with education at many levels from childrens classes to ceramic seminars, school projects to lecturing at degree level on Design courses.
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