An Talla Solais, Ullapool, until 25 September 2011

WHY are pots so much cheaper than paintings? Put it another way, why is the art of a painter considered so much more valuable than that of a ceramicist?

An Talla Solais is currently filled with ceramic art demonstrating without question that this is a medium rich in form, colour, graphic power and humour. From the classical beauty of Fergus Stewart’s bowls to Allison Weightman’s organic forms, from the delicate foliage effects on Helen Michie’s work to Alex Johannsen’s comic dogs, this show makes clear the variety of expressive options that can be used by ceramic artists.

Although the exhibition’s title indicates that smoke is the medium, as well as painting with fire, these makers paint with earth, salt and a plethora of minerals.

Allison Weightman

The star of the show is Allison Weightman, whose beautiful pieces range from huge, glistening, pregnant forms to just-hatched seed-pods. There are genie-refuges begging to be rubbed and elegant jars waiting to be balanced on a head, along with pleasingly curvaceous stoppered pots.

Her colours include fire-heart copper and turquoise, with exquisitely complex patterning of their surfaces.  Cupola, a sculpture of a mosque-like building surrounded by a flock of hanging ceramic white birds, is a response to a poem by Russian poet Vladimir Vysotksy, and the motion of the birds and their shadows, somehow suggesting their calls, is a far cry from the stereotype of ceramics as static and heavy.

Helen Michie’s work similarly defies this stereotype, with strange and beautiful marine shapes and hanging tiles imprinted by delicate natural materials like seaweed, birch leaves and ferns.

Helen Mitchie - Seaweed

There is paradox in baking the ephemeral softness of thistle-down into the enduring solidity of clay. In such pieces, and in her saggar-fired patterns of flowing sand, she catches a fleeting moment in time and makes it permanent.

Fergus Stewart makes functional pottery in many forms and colours, but his work presented here is limited to bowls, and blue-glazed bowls at that.

Bowls by Fergus Stewart

At first there is something odd about seeing pots just like those used on a daily basis for soup and salad in an art gallery, but by showing us just blue bowls, Fergus forces us to see more clearly their elegant shape, and more importantly to look at the subtle beauty of their salt glazes, like star-bursts or summer skies. A zen opportunity was perhaps missed by not giving them a room of their own in the gallery.

Alex Johannsen’s pieces acknowledge, in a tongue-in-cheek way, their ancestry in the mantelpiece china dog, though his Auld Wifies, complete with rollers, specs and fag, might have something to say about that.

Work by Alex Johannsen

As well as contributing pots to the show, Allison Weightman has ensured it is a real community exhibition, having encouraged dozens of people to get involved in creating tiny pots, which were fired in a pit at the gallery’s Open Day in late August.

The result of this process is a glass-case full of little polished pieces, arranged like a museum showcase of archaeological finds, and as we look at the rows of dimpled shapes we expect to see labels telling us they have been dug up from a Neolithic burial chamber or a Viking hoard.

The ceramics shared the gallery with paintings of pots and mixed media works. The three-dimensional pottery mostly outshines the squares on the walls, although some of the paintings do stand up to the competition.

Peter White brings not only three bowls, but also their luminous emptiness into the room, and Joanna Wright has an intriguing sequence representing Islamic pots in the British Museum, painted on a mosaic with different textures suggesting lights and atmospheres of distant places and times.

Peter Haring’s delicate photographic glimpses of a Buddha statue gave more hints of the ancient world traditions of ceramics.

Many of the paintings were still-life representations of jugs and bowls, which struggled to do justice to the real thing, yet, strangely, their prices outstripped the ceramics, often by a significant degree. The question of value was hard to ignore: what makes a painting worth £400 when the beautiful pot it represents can be yours for £40?

© Mandy Haggith, 2011

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