Touch and Trace: Clare Caulfield and Jess Skelton

Touch and Trace brings together painter and printmaker Clare Caulfield and ceramicist Jess Skelton to explore how artists record place through surface, structure and touch. Working across print, drawing, painting and ceramics, both artists build their work through repeated marks, layers and physical processes, translating the built environment into image and object.

Clare Caulfield’s city works draw on the architecture and movement of urban life. Her compositions are built through layering, repetition and fine line work, capturing the structure of streets, buildings and shifting perspectives. In her drawings, paintings and printmaking, Clare combines control with variation, she creates detailed surfaces where pattern, rhythm and observation intersect. Her work reflects the visual complexity of the city, translating it into precise, hand-crafted images.

Jess Skelton’s ceramics take a more physical approach. Her sculptural forms are shaped through a direct engagement with clay, where building, assembling and surface treatment happen together. The works often suggest fragments, stacked elements or architectural forms, with textured surfaces that hold traces of handling and change. Through firing, these marks are fixed, giving each piece a strong material presence.

Presented together, the exhibition highlights the relationship between flat image and three-dimensional form. Clare’s structured, urban work sits alongside Jess’ tactile ceramic works, creating a dialogue between observation and material response. The contrast is deliberate. One captures the city through line and composition, the other through weight, texture and form.

Touch and Trace invites close looking. It draws attention to detail, to repeated marks, edges and surfaces, and to the way each work carries evidence of how it was made. Across painting, drawing, printmaking and ceramics, the exhibition explores how artists translate the built environment into surface and object.

Name: New Ashgate Gallery

Email: [email protected]

Website: https://www.newashgate.org.uk/whats-on