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Pen. A large-scale (8m x 8m x 2.2m) site-specific ceramic sculpture commissioned for the exhibition S’Imbriquer, Autour de la Brique, Maladrerie Saint-Lazare, Beauvais, France. 24th June - 18th September 2011. The exhibition was organised by the Ecole d’Art, Beauvais in their cycle ‘Terre/Ceramique’ and brought together twenty artists concerned with brick and architectural ceramicists, (other artists included Jacques Kaufmann, Daniel Pontoreau).

The research combined and extended several of Burton’s research themes: the use of brick in ceramic sculpture; juxtapositions of scale; relationships between interior and exterior form and relationships between sculpture, craft and architecture. It built on research done for the Clayarch Museum, Korea (2008) and the Shanghai World Expo 2010, bringing this to new audiences in Europe, and was developed in the work ‘Buttress’ developed as part of a contemporary art forum in Kitchener, Ontario later in 2011.

‘Pen’ was built on an ancient meadow in the Maladrerie (the historic leper colony of Beauvais, now a scheduled monument) which Burton compared to the landscapes around Delhi where he had studied and documented brick stacks and manufactories. This earlier research underpinned the development of the sculpture.

Using 60,000 bricks provided by a briqueterie specialising in traditional brick-making processes, Pen was constructed according to technique practiced in India where bricks are stacked by hand in a particular figuration, (for example, none can be placed out of human reach) into a rectilinear form. At first impression a solid structure, Pen could be entered. In the interior space the viewer encountered a metre-high ring built from Burton’s miniature handmade bricks. Although uniformly a brick structure, unexpected contrasts in scale and the way in which the bricks had been made and stacked drew attention to the nature and use of these every-day objects.

Supported by a catalogue with essays by Stephanie Le Follic-Hadida and reviewed including in La Revue de la Ceramique et du Verre (no 179), La Revue de la Ceramique Moderne (no 569), Beaux-Arts (no 327), La Ceramica (no 11). Presented at symposia and conferences including Marking the Line (Somerset House, London 2013), Artification (Aalto University, Helsinki, 2012), Kith and Kin (National Glass & Ceramics Centre, Sunderland 2013)