Tom Norris on finding a creative language
Tom Norris creates ceramic vessels and mixed media compositions that are pieces of perfect balance. Free-flowing organic forms, linear shapes and fragmented structural elements adorn his works. A reflection of the cityscapes and countryside that are the backdown for the London based artist.
How does your creative process manifest, do you draft out ideas for your pieces, or allow the material to dictate form, glazes and finishes?
Usually, the process begins with an image or a set of ideas that I want to bring into dialogue with one another. I’m interested in how things around us impact or inform our lives. How our experiences or memories translate in our minds and inform behaviour and perception. To me, it is articulating these experiences that brings clarity to how we live.
There could be a draft in a very loose way, a doodle or an inky study of plants. Some of these qualities might be taken forward into a piece, most of them not.
Sometimes It could be a simple or trivial observation, like a photograph on my phone of spilled paint outside Ikea. That simply lets me know that light blue bedroom wall paint looks great against grey. I think the photo reel on anyone's phone would reveal a lot about that person. Mine is full of trees, chance encounters, erasures, and stuff.
The process begins with the idea, the form of the ceramic work allows a space for this creative process to play out. It isn’t just a surface to that end though. I don’t think anything really operates in a singularity. The elements are all in conversation. Playing around and balancing these components is what I do.
If I say form compliments the ideas that are explored on the surface or contained within the space its envelopes, it wouldn’t be the only thing going on, because it just isn’t…
You create ceramics as well as abstract, mixed media compositions. Do you apply the same process to your paintings as you do with ceramics - taking pauses and time to contemplate over them as you would with clay forms that need multiple firings in the kiln - or do these pieces have an entirely different rhythm and flow to them?
The tempo or energy that I approach throwing the pieces on a wheel must be different than applying the surfaces. The solid volume that a vessel finds is then balanced with the inflected line, gestures and uplifting colours.
Working on paper is a great way to limber up before starting something more permanent. There is an awkward responsibility of making pots as they do hang about for some time.
In a way the same process is applied to all my art making and the different medium means a slight variation on the same language or set of ideas.
It's about gears, definitely. Making things in ceramics is fairly slow going, with a lot of technical restraints. For me it’s important to not get weighed down by the properties of the material and become conditioned by it. But resist and keep it alive by having tension between the parts that make up the work. Surface, form and what it becomes as a thing.
The titles of your pieces are akin to nature and blend these painterly depictions of the world around us with harder, geometric lines that give each piece a unique language of its own. Is there an underlying narrative to the pieces you create?
Something that runs through the work is the natural world, forests, fields, big expanses of water or river systems. I find inspiration from experiencing the world that isn’t us, inevitably it contains us too, so patterns, structures and space become another reference point for how I think.
Just imagination or something like daydreaming, recalling these experiences could that be something?
Who do you look toward for inspiration in the art world?
Hard question… It’s a bit like naming who’s your favourite band.
I like experimental painting or any sculpture that deals with a combination of the image and material.
Is there any advice / thought that particularly resonates with you or that you find yourself coming back to when you are in the studio working on new pieces?
Someone once told me to ‘just get on’ with making the work. Such a simple thing to say and probably do. I like that cognition behind action.
I find meaning in just doing.
Actually…to try and do nothing is actually pretty hard. That’s not to say the empty moments in my day aren’t also rewarding, but I think it would be true to say, as people we are always communicating through actions.
Simply… start something you want to start and see what it does and respond to that.
What does the rest of 2022 have in store for you?
I’m working toward a solo show next year. I can’t say much on this just yet, just that it's going to be good!