Vivienne Ross’s interest lies in making pots that act as containers for both objects and ideas. She works intuitively and spontaneously allowing everyday thoughts, pre-occupations, and sometimes anxieties to dictate the direction of the image created. She tries to engage the viewer through humour by juxtaposing figures and images, as well as by altering their scale to create the unexpected. There is enough ambiguity in each piece for the viewer to bring their own interpretation to the work. In this busy world, she likes to think they are a celebration of the simple.
Each piece is unique, hand-made, individually decorated and signed. Vivienne works with a red earthenware clay which is decorated using coloured slips and glazes. Like the images on them, the shapes are kept simple, made using hand-processes such as press-moulding, coiling, slab-building and more recently throwing. The figurative decoration, often described as dreamlike, is achieved using brushwork, paper stencils and sgraffito.