Collection: Jonas Tew : Sculptor : Carmarthen School Of Art

Jonas Tew is a multidisciplinary artist based in Carmarthen, West Wales, whose practice spans stand-alone ceramic sculptures and mixed-media installations. His sculptural language emerges through an intuitive dialogue with clay, allowing the behaviour of the material to guide the development of form.

The work originates from an inquiry into the geological origins of clay itself—how, 420 million years ago, giant prehistoric fungi gradually broke down rock into sediment, forming the soil and clay from which terrestrial plant life eventually emerged. Clay carries the memory of once being rock and the biological imprints of countless generations of plant life that have grown from it.

Tew is drawn to the tension between myth and science, and to the ways biomorphic imagery can function as a form of personal storytelling. Casts of berries and forms resembling wilting petals act as subtle narrative devices through which the artist embeds autobiographical meaning.

Tew is interested in both challenging and extending traditional ceramic practice and its material alchemy. He employs the potter’s wheel to throw ceramic cones that are later assembled into complex sculptural structures. In recent works these formations suggest states of vulnerability and defence, and processes of self-reimagining following rupture.