Ros Ingram
by Brenda Ross
'I am lucky, I haven't had to go out and market myself,' says Ros Ingram of Alderminster, near Stratford upon Avon. 'People come to me.'
It all started when she won the student prize in 1999 at Art in Clay, the ceramics show held at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire each summer. Part of her prize was a free stand at the show the following year, but as her college was holding its degree show at the event in 2000 and she would be there anyway as a final year student, her prize was held over until 2001. That meant she was at the show three years running, and people remembered her distinctive work which combines ceramics and found objects to make colourful and fanciful fish.
'Being at Art in Clay meant that I gained experience of talking to people, including galleries, and I saw what the marketplace was like, what other ceramicists were doing, and how to market goods,' she says. It stood her in good stead after she left college. She has now been to the British Craft Trade Fair four times, winning the award for excellence in 2002, and she sells to over 100 galleries.
Ros had worked in ceramics before all this, but in a rather different way. After her schooling she went to art school, but left because she wanted to work. She was employed painting woodland figurines for a company in Stratford upon Avon, and after a break to have her daughter she returned there. But she found painting the same figures over and over again rather restricting. She and a fellow employee decided they wanted to make their own pieces, so they took an adult education course in ceramics. This course was intended to be an access course to university, and Ros was encouraged to follow that path into a degree course at Wolverhampton.
'Early in the course an artist came in who did figurative work, a combination of thrown parts, cast bits and decoration - called assemblage' says Ros. This appealed to her and she has continued to experiment with it ever since, combining ceramics, cast pieces and found objects into a form of 3D collage.
An interest in kitchenware led to some of her early pieces at college including items like a cheese grater, spatulas or corks, and she even used a casting of her own teeth, taken from a mould made by her dentist in the course of dental work, in a stylised figure. A college project about kitchens led her to make an installation piece with a sink, and she still uses that idea in a sink and taps that can be used as a water feature in the garden, with the pipe cast from a hose pipe and the 'taps' cast from ping-pong balls.
But she is best known for her fish. The first one she made was bought by the head of ceramics at her college. 'I thought that if she bought it there must be something in the idea,' says Ros. Early versions had ceramic heads and tails, with the bodies made up of, for example, a cup or several saucers. Since then she has incorporated all kinds of objects into her fish. 'I find objects by going to car boot sales, where people have boxes to rummage through. I also go to a scrap yard where I find rusted bits of metal, or even old carburettors which I have used as the bodies of fish.'
Ros sticks the different elements together using three different glues in turn, in a secret formula she devised herself. Old tongs and a windscreen wiper have been turned into fish fins and other features. Even an old hand-held hair dryer has become a fish's body, and old tins and bottles are always popular.
'I make to order on themes,' says Ros. 'People choose the sort of thing they want but no two fish are exactly alike as it depends what found objects I come across, and I don't make the same thing twice. People may choose a certain colour, or their choice may be for nostalgia reasons. Some send me an old tin or bottle to use, that reminds them of the past.' One lady sent some old tobacco pipes for Ros to incorporate into a fish. Bought direct from Ros, the fish range in price from around £28 to £60.
In the last few years Ros has found her own work broadening through working with young children in schools. The idea began in 2000 when Ros was at the Royal Show at Stoneleigh, Warwickshire, displaying her work on the Princes Trust stand because she received a loan from them to help start in business. She was approached there by the Arts and Education Officer for Warwickshire, who wanted her to teach in schools and show them how to use ceramics in a new and inventive way.
Since then she has become a popular visitor at schools, for anything from painting lessons with a reception class to working on a mosaic with older primary school children on one day a week for six weeks, or sometimes going to one school for a week, working with a different class each day on the same type of project, seeing what different age groups come up with.
'I also do clay workshops or whatever the school wants, depending on the curriculum. The idea is for schools to use ceramics in a new and inventive way, and to give the children an awareness of how to look at things in a different way and of recycling things, of looking at form instead of function.
'I also teach groups of teachers, so that they gain more skills themselves instead of always getting artists in to work with the children. It helps them to think of ideas themselves and get used to working with different materials.'
Teaching now takes up half of Ros' time, because of the amount of planning involved. But she doesn't mind. 'Teaching is completely different from making my own work - which is solitary.
I enjoy working with the children. They get so involved in making something. I take in my bits and pieces and found objects, and they love it. They don't have the chance anywhere else to use all this stuff.'
Ros' own three-year-old son loves it too. Not only has she taken sessions at his playgroup, but he has grown up in a household where this creativity goes on all the time. 'He know about construction,' says Ros, 'and when I am devising projects for schoolchildren I try them out on him. He is always making things. If he finds a piece of cardboard he will look around the house for bits and pieces to stick to it. Recently he stuck various decorative bits to pieces of paper to make 'kites', and tried to fly them. He has never been interested in playing with toys like building blocks or trains because he finds them too restricting. He likes to create his own things.'
Ros' twelve-year-old daughter has always been keen on drawing and painting, and has won awards for it. She finds it rather restricting being taught art and woodwork in a formalised way at school, but in her own time she can continue with her more free, creative approach that she developed as a young child.
The final member of the family, Ros' husband Jeremy, gets involved too sometimes, helping Ros when she is creating large-scale structures for school projects. Otherwise his spare time 'project' has been the DIY work on their 1860s cottage. At one time a worker's cottage for a nearby country estate, it needed renovating, modernising and extending before they could move in two years ago, and Jeremy did much of the work. He has also converted an original washroom and pigsty in the back garden, to make a workshop for Ros, with a floor and ladder installed to give upstairs storage.
More recently Ros has become involved with Art-Sense, a West Midlands-based charity promoting artwork that can be appreciated by senses other than sight. Ros made a 9-fish hanging piece for them, popular with the visually impaired because they can feel the different shapes and materials used. On behalf of the charity she also holds workshops so the blind and partially sighted can have a go at creating their own pieces.
'I get involved in this and the teaching of schoolchildren because I want to encourage people to look at art in a different way,' says Ros, 'and to show that anyone can do it.'
Although her fish are still popular, Ros wants to develop other work too. She has found the young children inspirational in the creatures they create, and in the projects she devises for them.
'I love the way children are so imaginative, with no inhibitions. And their work with materials reflects back into my own work; they give me ideas.' She created a dog with a lager can for a body, as a project for the children, and she wants to create more dogs.
'I want to use other found materials, and introduce plastics and glass, so I am not restricting myself.' She has already started making fish skeletons from cut-out pieces of cans, and wants to develop figures of people made from tins, cans, bolts, washers, etc. The fish for which she has become known are about to be joined by an array of other pieces in their distinctive, unusual world.
Ros Ingram
No. 6 Alderminster
Nr Stratford upon Avon CV37 8NY
Tel: 01789 450877
For the Art-Sense charity:
Tel: 0247 6334960
Website: www.art-sense.org.uk
