Going against the tide

摘要

Within moments of the sculptor Patricia Volk picking me up from Bath station, she stops her car in the middle of a busy intersection and jumps out to shoo a wandering cat away to safety. Queues of cars are forming all around, their drivers nonplussed at the trouble she is taking. Patricia pays them no mind - as I am soon to confirm, hers is a personality unafraid to swim against the tide. Cat dispatched, we set off again for her studio, where she has worked alone for over 25 years. A member of the Royal British Society of Sculptors, she has garnered a reputation for her serene ceramic heads and composites of abstract shapes, which play with form and line. But as a sculptor working solely in clay, Patricia battles - almost daily, it seems - against the assumption that she is not an artist, but a potter. 'I've had people come into my studio and say, "Pots!" I don't make pots. My pieces have not got holes in them. You can't put daffodils in them. I find it intensely irritating. It's not that being an artist or a potter is better than the other - it's just different.'