Stories Held, Hollie Thornley

23 Jul-19 Oct 2025

Close-up detail of ceramic.. Credit: Image: Artists own.

Overview

Hollie Thornley’s ceramic practice begins with the ground beneath her feet. She forages clay from the local landscape, an act of excavation and close observation that lets the material reveal its origins. This intuitive process responds to the land and its fragments, transforming weathered traces of nature and human activity into quiet prompts for making. Using ancient hand-building techniques such as pinching and coiling, Thornley allows each vessel to grow slowly and organically. Every form is shaped by touch and memory, with visible marks registering time, pressure, and pause. The surface bears the history of its making, embedded in the clay.

Central to Thornley’s approach is the deep connection between material and place. Natural fragments, such as stones and shells, are often pressed into the clay or shape its irregular, earthy forms. These vessels reflect both landscape and human presence – not as polished artifacts but as quiet offerings or vessels of transition. They explore how stories are held within objects, preserved and transformed over time through touch and making. Thornley’s tactile storytelling deepens this dialogue, enriching conversations about material, memory, and the ongoing relationship between place and making.

Interwoven throughout her work are themes of ruin and repair, expressed in a sensitivity to what is broken, buried, or overlooked. Her ceramics are intimate gestures, small acts honouring connections between people, place, and what remains. At times, the vessels take on a devotional quality – ephemeral shrines holding traces of the artist’s own experience and sense of self. Through this close relationship with the land and its remnants, Thornley invites us to reconsider the practice of preservation – not as fixing, but as ongoing attention.

About the Artist

Hollie Thornley is an artist based in Portsmouth. She studied Design Crafts at De Montfort University, specialising in ceramics. Now working from her studio at the Hotwalls, she balances her creative practice with teaching, offering small workshops in hand-building and clay exploration.