Candida Stevens is Cumber’s Champion for The Wick. “Marice’s works are expressions of the human experience. Ceramics are very often clean and controlled, often skilled and beautiful, but what Marice is doing is different. She is taking clay and using it to physically express her journey through life. Using the clay as her canvas to express her ‘Slogans of Survival,’ they seek out the light, The water became clearer and now I swim strong and deep and I hold the warmth of friendship, you are in my hands for a while. When you pause to think about these messages they have a resonance to them. Imagine how you would feel if someone said that to you. You’d glow.

Marice has navigated some difficulties, as have many, but she is using her place as an artist to help us consider how we frame things. It is not, as they say, what happens to you, it is what you do with the experience that shapes you. As a life coach myself this attention to encouraging others to find the positive resonates deeply. As a child Marice wrote poetry, she then trained in ceramics. These pots are the culmination of these parts.”

Cumber’s ‘confessional vessels’, as the artist puts it, are inspired by everyone from Zoe Buckman’s empowering embroidery works, to the raw colours of Rothko, to the candour and gusto of the late painter Charlotte Salamon. Cumber also takes inspiration from her everyday life, and her ceramic pieces often refer back to notes and diaries the artists keeps. “When I make these observations it is not with the purpose of creating something visual from them, but collectively they tell a story and I am using these to inspire new dialogues and narratives between me, the work and the viewer.”

Later this year, Cumber will present a solo exhibition at Candida Stevens’ gallery, and she is currently focused on a major project, based on her family and themes of inheritance – “taking the memory that is transient and without form and can be lost from generation to generation, and then turning this into a permanent and physical object.”
 
Asked how she feels about making work and what success means to her now, Cumber is wistful. “That initial step into a shared open studio space, after all that time, changed my life and changed me. I guess, the achievement is finally believing and valuing myself. I gave up my creative practice due to family commitments and financial responsibility and so, through circumstance, I had neglected the thing that is most important to nurturing my inner self. Now I can say that I am an artist, and that feels so good!”