This series of vessels by Max Bainbridge were originally made as part of a wider installation titled The Subjective Element, for the biennial Jerwood Makers Open Award in 2019. Awarded in collaboration with his partner Abigail Booth, these vessels were first exhibited under their studio name Forest + Found, alongside three of Booth’s ‘Revenant’ tar and charcoal paintings as a cyclical exploration of the materiality and psychology of the ‘tree’ and its symbiotic relationship with the natural elements. Each vessel was made in direct dialogue with elemental forces informing and dictating the form and finish of these sculptural works. Using fire and water as a tool, Bainbridge, is always just on the edge of control, as first he turns large sections of freshly cut beech and oak wood into his signature forms of the Land Jar and footed Offering Bowl. Allowing them to dry quickly he encourages dramatic splits and cracks as the wood shrinks and contracts. Pushing this accelerated state of change, he sets fires inside the vessels, allowing the intense heat and flames to crack and warp the vessels from within. Some have been left raw with fragile shakes and burnished to a porcelain-like finish, whereas others have been burnt black and treated in a rich pine tar, produced from charcoal firing wood from a giant storm-felled Cedar of Lebanon tree. Each one bears the signs and marks of the sculptor’s hand against the raw nature of the wood itself in a reflection of the fragile and sometimes destructive relationship between man and nature.

Jerwood Arts, London; Manchester Art Gallery, London; Visual Arts Centre; Scunthorpe and The National Centre for Craft and Design, Sleaford.