Peisley’s work is intense, highly charged, with an emotional content that relates to the everyday drama of existing.
A multidisciplinary Artist for over 30 years, she qualified with a BA (hons) in Fine Art at Bath Academy 1988, MA at City Of Birmingham Polytechnic 1989 and MA in Art Psychotherapy Hertfordshire University in 2006.
Her ceramic practice draws from a breadth of experience. Her work attempts to engender intimacy both in the making and in the dialogue with the viewer. Using the unconscious and memory she treats each piece like a Jungian mandala, a portal to the soul, pulling at content for a personal narrative. Inspired by the ancient illustrations on Etruscan and Greek ceramic vessels, the drawing in the underglaze aims to be both lyrical and timeless in its simplicity.
Made on her lap or the floor, within the radius of her arms, these pieces are created with an attitude of devotion. They are meditations on translating feeling into narrative; charting a stream of consciousness. Trusting the Jungian process of making mandalas, working within a porcelain sphere, she believes each piece by-passes conscious blocks in order to access everyday details and dramas that might otherwise never find expression.
Often feeling in a state of dissociation, the making offers Peisley an opportunity to regurgitate experience in order to be more present to it in a newly metabolised form. She does not make to show a story as such, but to consider what her own story might be. She believes that the unconscious, when liberated from the conscious mind, is a vigilant truthsayer. She leans into the material like the shadowy, forbidden areas of psyche, sometimes working in a diagrammatic way, carving out an idea, or reaching further for a more embodied drawing; painting and carving the surface until she arrives at an aspiration of truth.
There is a process of her calling and responding to her inner self, which is mirrored in the viewers’ reaction to the work. Beguiling, her work can suck us in and reframe what we always knew. Porcelain can take the depth of her enquiry and, once fired, offers back to the artist nuances of experience. The unknown and uncertainty of the alchemical processes in firing and re-firing give happenchance the opportunity for further revelations.
…Peisley engages as a woman grappling with her sense of self, ceramics, the universe and everything, getting unexpected validation from the outcomes.
