Simon Lee Dicker and Mella Shaw Lunchtime Screening Event
Simon Lee Dicker and Mella Shaw Lunchtime Screening Event
Wednesday 11 March 2026, 12.30 – 1.30pm
Research Space
Lunch will be provided, including vegan and gluten-free options.
Free, please book online.
Simon and Mella: Should this be promoted only to members (and anyone else you would like to invite) or to our public newsletter and social media?
Join us for this informal screening event to share recent work by Studio Holder Mella Shaw and work in progress from Simon Lee Dicker.
Simon Lee Dicker is our current Reach Scotland Resident, here until 15 March 2026. During his residency he is developing further research into the West and Mid Lothian shale Bings, created through 20th century paraffin oil production. At ESW he is working through experiments with handmade glazes and clay bodies in relation to shale and other waste materials.
During this event Dicker will share a short film which is a work in progress connected to his Bings research.
Mella Shaw uses clay to make objects and site-specific installations centred around reoccurring themes of balance, tipping points, thresholds and edges. This often manifests in publicly engaged environmental work addressing the tipping point of the global climate crisis.
Shaw will show as short film which was made to accompany her exhibition Sounding Line, a large-scale ceramic installation addressing the devastating effect of marine sonar on whales and other cetaceans, made from clay that includes bone from a beached whale.
The films are fifteen minutes and six minutes long and the artists will be present at the event to introduce the works and respond to feedback.
About the artists
Simon Lee Dicker
Born within the circle of the M25, Simon Lee Dicker now lives and works in rural Somerset. He describes himself as having a restless artistic practice that shifts between solitary studio-based production and organising collective and socially engaged projects. His work explores a discordant relationship with landscape and the marks we make on the natural world, from radioactive haystacks and memories of a local power station, to toppled Weather Stations and mounds of discarded tyres. Recent work has taken the form of large scale temporary sculptural installations, ceramics and creative writing that reference the architecture of post-industrial landscapes and ‘more-than human’ species – ecosystem engineers that restore, regenerate and rewild these sites. In 2011 he co-founded OSR Projects to bring people together and explore artist-led activity in rural Somerset.
https://www.simonleedicker.co.uk/
Mella Shaw
Before taking up ceramics, Mella Shaw had a 15-year career in exhibitions in the museum and gallery sector. In 2009, she received a two-year Diploma in Ceramics from City Lit in London. She then completed an MA in Ceramics and Glass from the Royal College of Art in 2013. Mella was selected for Collect Open in 2018 and was awarded the Henry Rothschild Memorial Ceramic Bursary in 2020. In 2023 she won the British Ceramics Biennial Award Prize. She lives and works in Edinburgh, is a visiting lecturer on the BA Ceramic Design course at Central St Martin’s.
