Loretta Braganza was born in Mumbai, India and came to the UK in 1965. She began her practice as a ceramicist in 1990 via a career in dance, graphic arts, textile design and sculpture. She now works from her ceramics studio in York.
Her distinctive style comprising taut edges, clean lines and complex mark making swiftly earned her exhibitions and commissions as well as awards from the Crafts Council and the Arts Council. Her work is grounded in her training in sculpture and consists of abstract forms which she hand builds and then decorates with coloured slips from an austere colour palette.
Forms are loosely based on traditional Indian clay and metal vessel shapes – ‘hundis’ for water, ‘lotas’ for pouring & ‘chattis’ for storage. These forms have always lurked in Loretta’s imagination and have been an inspirational source for both form and texture.
Words about Loretta’s latest collection Fruit & Bloom from her daughter, Ayesha Braganza:
“Loretta Braganza’s latest work Fruit & Bloom inhabits a space informed by her thirty years as a ceramic artist. Her journey is evident in the complex surface techniques honed and refined from an unconventional and self- taught methodology that began with her training as a graphic artist.
The pulsating rhythms and astonishing movement of these textural pieces started as a fascination with inter-related forms which are evident in her earliest works. Even the joy of these re-imagined fruit are thematic preoccupations. For example, one of the works in her Fusion series (2005) was inspired by the angle of a seed slicing fruit skin. In this new work her technique, form and subject show the maturity and joyous liberation of an artist at her peak.
Her innovative techniques involve painstaking applications of several coats of coloured slip that are applied and removed to reveal just the right luminous blush. The variety of everyday objects co-opted to make her textural markings are astonishing – from pencil ends and violin strings, to broken tubes and brush heads. Braganza makes notoriously difficult techniques look easy – like the flat ‘top’ insertions of two of the fruits. Such perfect linear flatness can only be achieved by weeks of drying, honing and a deep understanding of the unforgiving nature of a kiln firing.
Fruit & Bloom initially seems less about groupings than her previous works – yet they do relate to one another through their wonderful colouration – pulsing yellows, her trademark blue hues and the palest of peaches. Even the marks seem to leap from form to form – here a letter glimpsed, there a number revealed, a continuing fascination with nature’s mathematical patterns and patina. In this body of work there are six ‘real’ fruits – dragon, star, pineapple, jack, cashew, peach; and four ‘imagined’. Together they provide the perfect canvas to display Braganza’s vibrant artistic energy and soaring inventiveness.
The confidence with which she uses multimedia is a particularly striking element of the work – pin heads, the stem of a snake bark acer and even a bicycle spanner. The boldness of her choices is always tempered with skilful artistic judgment that truly showcases her thirty years as a maker.”
