THAMES MATTER

Project Overview

This project investigates a sense of place through materiality. Taking an exploratory approach, Neve Beill walked along areas of the River Thames, collecting clay and a range of rocks, sand, bone, and found objects to create a collection of works titled Thames Matter.

The process is guided by found objects and documented textures, rarely starting with a fixed idea. Instead, Neve responds to the materials collected and what she has observed whilst walking along the foreshore. Testing each material individually is crucial to her process; she fires the materials she finds at various temperatures, observing how they react and deciding which reactions best reflect the location. These effects are combined with moulded found objects or natural ash glazes. Honouring the history of the Thames, the primary forms are inspired by Roman vessels discovered in or around the River Thames.

Bones

When mudlarking along the River's foreshore , I have consistently come across bones, presumably animal remains from the meat industry, discarded into the river over decades. I’ve been experimenting with various ways to repurpose this material.There’s something compelling about the mystery of found objects, and I wanted to capture that sense of the unknown in a pot that echoes the character of the Thames itself. The glaze on the inside of the pot, is a combination of wild clay from the River Banks, fireplace ash and crushed bones. The textural details is vitrified clay, sourced from various locations along the Thames. The final pot tells a story of what I observed, documented and learnt. 

Teeth

One of the more unusual and unexpected discoveries I made while mudlarking was a set of dentures, featuring a single gold tooth at the front. The find intrigued me, adding a sense of mystery to the river that I hadn’t felt before. It raised a number of questions: Who did these teeth belong to? How did they end up in the river near Hammersmith Bridge?

They were clearly valuable to someone, the gold tooth is real, and the craftsmanship suggests the work of a skilled dentist. Were they part of a corpse’s remains? Or did they simply fall from someone's mouth as they leaned over the bridge? And how long had they been lying there, hidden in the mud?

I created a mould of the dentures and embedded them into the surface of one of my pots, fusing them with vitrified Thames clay in an attempt to reflect how I found them, gleaming in the thick, black mud. One of my main aims with this project was to incorporate found objects and evoke a strong sense of place. This particular piece captures both goals in a way that was entirely unexpected, yet deeply resonant.

Glass

When walking along areas of the foreshore and collecting clay, it was vital to wear gloves, due to the River being heavily polluted with, glass, plastic and sewage. One thing that struck me was the amount of glass, even within the clay I dug up. As I reclaimed the clay, I was constantly picking out shards of glass. I wasn’t sure if these came from within the clay itself, or had been dug up nearer the surface, when I was digging down for the clay. Either way, it was slightly unsettling.

Once the clay was fully reclaimed and I began throwing it on the wheel, I soon noticed small cuts all over my hands, presumably caused by fragments of glass that had slipped through the cleaning process and been crushed during reclaiming.

Some of my early test pots revealed a shiny, iridescent quality, not from the clay itself, but from these tiny glass particles. That unexpected result inspired the final piece in this collection. I decided to deliberately reintroduce some of the glass shards I had originally removed, embedding them into the surface of the pot after it had been thrown. When fired in the kiln, the vitrified clay and melting glass fused together, creating an effect that speaks directly to the raw, polluted materiality of the Thames. Feedback from a mudlarker, revealed that the iridescent sheen of the melted glass echoed the visual qualities of the river’s surface, shimmering and reflective due to oil pollution. 

 

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