Article
Search
Upcoming Exhibitions
Article
Search
Upcoming Exhibitions
Green Pebble Magazine
Rood Hall Studio
Bungay Road
Beccles NR34 8HE
Articles> Pam Schomberg
After fifteen
years of running an art gallery in the city of Colchester, potter Pam Schomberg
locked up shop two and a half years ago to relocate to a bright, airy studio
two miles out of town. The challenge: to reintroduce her work to the art market.
‘There is nothing subdued about Pam Schomberg or her work. In the same
way her ceramics contain explosions of gilt and colour, so Pam works, talks
and laughs with an energy that equals her creations.
Pam is in full swing preparing for several mixed exhibitions, one at The Mall
Galleries in London. She is aware that she has taken on a heavy workload and
vows to do less in 2009. Not simply because time is in short supply, she explains,
but because she genuinely wants – and needs – to focus on her
artistic development.
The reason for Pam’s urgency goes back twenty years. In the mid 1980s,
having completed her diploma in studio ceramics with distinction at the Colchester
Institute School of Art, she launched her career as a potter in a basement
studio in Colchester in Essex. ‘The shop above was empty, so in my naivety
I opened a gallery. I thought I could open a gallery and just ‘nip upstairs’.
But it’s more than a fulltime job when you do it properly.’
And ‘properly’ she did it. The Pam Schomberg Gallery (later Gallery
Schomberg) was awarded ‘Crafts Council Selected’ status. It rapidly
spread into adjacent rooms and she soon found herself usurped by the needs
of the business and its administration. Fifteen years later, she realised
she had one last chance at developing herself as an artist, and closed the
gallery.
‘In the end, I found my work was standing still,’ she explains.
‘I wasn’t pushing on. In the last two years before my decision
to close, I didn’t get into my studio at all. I was just hitting 60
and I thought I had to do something. You just have to make a decision, because
how much more time have you got left in the studio when you’re 60?’
To illustrate the point, she holds out her hands and demonstrates how her
fingers sometimes lock up when she works the clay.
This is only a small part of the article.
Subscribe to Green Pebble Magazine
and have the latest issues delivered
straight to your door!
Artist
Search