Shanika Yeomans

Venue 19 : The School Room Queen Elizabeth's Hospital BS8 1JX

Artist’s statement:

Hello, my name is Shanika Dedunu Yeomans. I was born in Srilanka. I had a traditional buddhist upbringing. The traditions of my country inspires all of my pottery work. I have my own ball mill which use for grinding the wild rocks I find, and I am very interested in not only making my own glazes but also the understanding of the ceramic constituents of a successful, durable and food safe glazes. I have my own gas kiln and sevaral electric kilns. To keep things simple only fire to high stoneware/porcelain temperature of 1280-1300°C in a reduction kiln and I only use food safe glazes. Sometimes some pottery go through a third firing to fired the luster in my electric kiln.

The Name “polwarepottery “comes from the word “pol” which means coconut in srilankan language. Most of my work is kitchenware / homeware.

I’ve recently started making planters which I weave Macrame hangers from the outer husk or hair also called coconut coire ropes that my mother in Sri Lanka makes me.

I have been refurbishing pottery equipment with the help of my engineer friend, as a small business and perfecting my craft of pottery making for the last 6 years. I really love the old English electric pottery equipment which are such good quality. My husband is a lapidarist and we plan to introduce his lapidary and smithing work into my pottery work in the future, along with decorative enamelling work. The both of us are constantly having new ideas and new directions, but we have four young children to bring up. Therefore getting the pottery business up and running is taking far longer than we would like.

I mostly concentrate painting my pottery with the ancient Chinese celadon glazes which I’m fascinated with. I like the subtle earthenly colours of celadon glazes and iron oxide bleeding through the claybody makes it looks like being in a wood. I love experimenting with glazes.