A life that found meaning in mud

Naomi Márquez is more than 80 years young and still working on her ceramics in Caracas, Venezuela. This year Encounters has give over an entire room to show three pieces of her work and photographs of her, a film in which she talks about her life and work and a kiln in which works are transformed.

She pays homage to Earth … Earth … a magic word that symbolises membership, maternity, parental, strength, return, union, passion, footprint, sand, dust ….

Naomi’s great gift is to share this work with visitors to the Brighton Festival who might otherwise never see such a combination of skill, passion and energy that takes simple materials and constructs something that joins us with our stone-age past, with the heavens and with the forces of life and the rhyme of nature. Comments about Naomi’s work include: “wonderful, wonderful exhibition – marvelous ceramic sculptures” – “Very moved by Naomi’s work: I’ll remember it for years to come” – and “amazing to see the world that this artist is creating”.