Caroline Egleston makes “tile-scapes” - glazed ceramic shapes which fit together to suggest movement as their colours, textures and patterns play together. Brushwork tiles reflect her love of painterly majolica decoration and she uses this technique for spontaneity and delicate layering effects. Her compositions of tiles are kept within the basic grid that is implicit in tiling, to give cohesion to the work but she also explores possibilities for working beyond this framework, with corresponding curved shapes which allude to each other.

For Caroline the tonal balance of a piece s crucial, as is subtlety of colour and glaze. She carefully avoids her pieces looking over-arranged or over-worked, and is keen to retain the quality of the clay pieces and immediacy of touch. Plain tiles with textured patterns visually anchor her brushwork designs and Caroline has developed her own glazes (made from natural oxides) for surface interest and subtlety. In the final arrangement she always looks for balance:  rhythm, echo, contrast and surprise, to create a cohesive piece which leads the eye on a journey.

Caroline trained in majolica techniques at Faenza in Italy and is also a skilled watercolour artist, delighting delicate layering effects. She is aware that tiles should not be dominated by fashion, being fixed on the wall, but enjoys the current trend for strong colour and pattern.  For her, making is a type of research and a part of our restless human endeavour to use materials in a creative, communicative way. She makes and arranges ceramic shapes to try to articulate the patterns unconsciously recorded ‘in the mind’s eye’: aiming for cognition and recognition.

Caroline joined Design-Nation in 2019 and is based in rural Hampshire.