Strange Bedfellows

Philip Eglin

Philip Eglin is an artist who has made an outstanding contribution to contemporary ceramics and has a hard won international reputation and following. Strange Bedfellows marks Philip Eglin’s sixth solo exhibition with The Scottish Gallery, which delves deep into his image making and re-visits a subject he first explored in 2009; the priest and pin-up. He has made a new series of figures and raku dishes, the latter illustrated with line drawings generated from photographs and carte de visite images. Eglin explores contrasts and similarities, associating or pairing opposites with the title Strange Bedfellows aptly describing the incongruous and contradictory twinning of the priest and the pin-up. His work is held in numerous public collections worldwide.

‘This flippancy is hopefully echoed in the immediacy of the pressing of each dish - taken from a mould made of a plastic throwaway food container, and then inverted and re-shaped while soft so that each individual pressing is subtly different from the next. This is complemented by the unpredictable nature of the raku process - removing work, red hot from the kiln, burying in sawdust and then quenching in water to make permanent the results.’

– Philip Eglin, 2021