Leora Honeyman

Comfy Chair – Comfy Chair is an early iteration in a series of objects looking at hospitable materials and objects of interspecies use. With multiple narratives, these objects explore the language of materiality in an emerging paradigm as well a the possibility of inviting colonisation by other species into our objects of ordinary use. What are the limitaions and boundaries of these possibilities?

Blue primrose table – Using the structural geometry of a primrose generated in CAD, the form is then cut by hand and subjected to deformation by rolling through the slab roller. This piece speaks of the beauty created by deformation of perfect symmetry. It also asks us to question scale, or empathise with different sized beings whist inviting us into a state of child like innocence.

Medium:

Porcelain

Size:

55cm x 40cm

Djin Jar – Grey Crowned Hoopoe

Djin Jar – Antidote (leaning into the wobble)

Djin Jar – Bubble top

The Djin Jar series asks the viewer to question the nature of the invisible.

Derived from the form and function of traditional ginger jars, the void inside the vessel is treated as a portal or containment for non physical qualities, questioning the cultural tendency to dismiss subtler existence.

The series references various traditions to whom the inside of the vessel holds special spiritual significance.

Medium:

Various

Size:

Approx 40cm high x 20cm wide

Shelf Thing – Shelf thing is a high wall shelf with apotropaic yarn interventions

Medium:

Porcelain, yarn

Size:

450mm wide x 1500mm

Leora has come to ceramics and glass from a background in architecture and event design, having created sets for events and locations internationally, including the Royal Albert Hall, Glastonbury festival and more.

Born and partly raised in Southern Africa, she is influenced by the natural world and by intercultural hybridities and brings to her ceramic practice a broad material intelligence and a multi media approach.

Now centred in object design, Leora is interested in creating objects of use on a more intimate scale which blur boundaries between sculpture and more traditional conceptions of 'use'.

She welcomes discussions with galleries, residencies, commercial and private clients and is excited to work to commission as well as direct sale..

She is a QEST scholar (2020) and an awarded winner of ''Fresh" British Ceramics Biennalle (2021)

Leora’s practice aims to raise cultural questions through speculative design.

By creating mixed-media objects of ambiguous purpose, she asks the viewer to imagine future cultural possibilities. Her processes embrace the digital realm as a starting-point, but she introduces an aspect of chaos to the deliberations of the machine, for example juxtaposing foaming porcelain with precise, cnc-produced and moulded porcelain forms. Leora is interested in pattern, materiality and purpose as cultural markers, feeling that as an artist these are powerful tools to raise questions around diversity and acceptance.

The objects are intended as items of function, although it is understood that the use is ambiguous and that they may be viewed from a conceptual, sculptural or even decorative point of view. By creating objects whose use is improbable, she asks the viewer to imagine a heterotopia in which magic is embraced.

By employing digital tools as an aid to design the objects are also able to occupy the metaverse, where the digital influence allows impossibilities. The digital influence allows a precision to underlie the distortions of material process, in much the same way as environmental factors distort the blueprint of the natural world. With this in mind, the processes are multi-layered and attempt to achieve a similar paradoxical exquisiteness of form as that found in nature.

Leora Honeyman

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Royal College of Art