Down a ginnel, behind a high fence on a terraced street in Sheffield, sits a garden shed.
Like many garden sheds, it’s full of tools. But in Ben Hall’s shed, these are wheels, clay knives, loops and sponges. Surfaces are smudged with the dried residues of clay used to make the ceramics that line the high shelves.
Recognisable for their etched and scored surfaces, glazed and fired in rich blues, Ben’s vessels are containers for stories, observations and small moments of everyday life. Making pots is a story as old as civilisation itself. For thousands of years, ceramics have survived long after the people who made them have disappeared. Archaeologists have helped us understand our ancestors through fragments of broken pottery, using them to understand how people lived, worked, ate and thought. But what might people learn about us a thousand years from now through Ben’s poems etched into this enduring material?
Scratched into their surfaces are haiku. Short poems traditionally made up of three lines following a 5–7–5 syllable pattern.
A haiku wonders
How to fit a world in three
Brief breaths of itself
(See what we did there?)
Throughout our days we leave traces behind. Fingerprints on a glass. Notes scribbled on scraps of paper. A shopping list tucked into a trolley frame. The answer to half a crossword. Our first baby teeth saved in a box. Perfume on a shirt. Thinking on times we have lost or miss someone close to us… Often it’s the most unremarkable things that become the visceral details we cling on to.
Ben’s poems celebrate these quirks, rituals and oddities that quietly shape our lives: the local pigeon, a favourite pub sign, the idiosyncratic behaviours of folk that might otherwise go by unnoticed. With warmth, humour and curiosity, he captures something of what it feels like to
be here, now.
For this exhibition, Ben’s garden shed studio becomes the foundation of a new artwork installation for National Festival of Making. Capturing some of the spirit of makers and the unique spaces they create for their craft, it provides a glimpse into the place where these poems and pots begin,and the unique traces we leave behind.
Delivered in Partnership with Blackburn Museum & Art Gallery
Exhibition Talk
1:45pm, Saturday 4th July
Ben Hall in Conversation with Alex Zawadzki, Curator and Director of The Second Act Gallery, and representatives from Blackburn Museum & Art Gallery.
Blackburn Museum & Art Gallery, Watercolour Gallery
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