This summer, CAMPLE LINE is delighted to present Love Bites, an exhibition of new work in ceramic by artist Bryony Rose. The exhibition runs until Sunday 31 August.

For this exhibition, Rose brings together a new body of work that continues her exploration of glazed ceramic sculptural relief and builds upon two recent solo shows Blinking, glare at Quench Gallery in Margate in 2024, and Night Car at Kiosk in Glasgow in 2023. In ten new works made for Love Bites, Rose has expanded the range of her subjects to include horseflies, erupting insect bites, dandelion seed heads and fields of sheep viewed through car windows. Challenging the pastoral language of traditional decorative ceramics, she also tells semi-autobiographical stories of longing and restlessness that foreground the at times abrasive, repetitive and banal aspects of adolescent rural experience.

Over the last seven years, Rose has focused her practice around the development of ceramic sculptural reliefs and an exploration of narrative that has centred on memories of her rural Scottish upbringing. She is interested in the relationship between lived experience and memory, using remembered sensations and images as a starting point to complicate narrative and explore emotional response: ‘I am drawn to the inherent eeriness and nostalgia that can be pulled out of these memories – on a personal and cultural level.’ For Rose, the process of creating a pattern and ordering the parts are all a kind of fiction: ‘When memory fails there are optical errors.’

For Love Bites, Rose has drawn upon the last summer she spent in Dumfriesshire before moving to Glasgow aged seventeen, framed by memories of ‘an all-consuming first love and the draining feeling of being at home and with my family at that time’. She has recalled: ‘The clegs were particularly intense that summer, biting my mole-scattered skin.’ In this sense, the exhibition’s title alludes to both the horsefly’s bite and the hickey – an emblem of teenage longing – and perhaps a contemporary adolescent recasting of John Donne’s flea, bluntly evoked in a series of four reliefs that feature horseflies embedded in fleshy pink bites rendered as concentric raised circles.