JGM Gallery from Londond, the UK, places particular emphasis on its publications. Through them, the gallery seeks to contextualise exhibitions for its community of friends, visitors, and collectors—offering deeper insight into the ideas, references, and material concerns behind each project. Produced alongside exhibition catalogues, issues of The JGM Review are created to further amplify the gallery’s programmes, extending the conversation beyond the gallery walls. In this spirit, the following article explores the work of Tom Norris through the lens of pareidolia, memory, and the distinctive balance between representational suggestion and abstract mark-making.
For British ceramicist and painter Tom Norris, making vessels is not a fixed destination but an open-ended process in which he experiments with the “loosening and tightening of figurative and abstract forms” (Norris, 2024). Norris draws on the phenomenon of pareidolia—the mind’s tendency to organise and find patterns in nebulous imagery—as a way of interpreting what appears on the surface of his work. By balancing moments of high intensity (when forms feel more clearly pictured) with passages of broader, elusive mark-making, Norris creates an effect in which figures seem to emerge from abstraction—more like recognition than depiction.
Although his vessels carry a strong artistic presence, they are also functional objects. As Katherine Jones RA notes: “Norris uses the form of the ceramic vessel, not straightforwardly as fine art, but also as a functional object. The toughness of some of the vessels and their robust, bear-hug size is balanced by their soft, honest silhouette.”
This balance—between firmness and tenderness, structure and softness—extends to the visual language of the work. Gestural markings sit beside more rigid compositions, producing a surface that is both lived-in and carefully composed. Interspersed among marks resembling trees, foliage, and growth are hard-edged blocks of colour and right-angled lines. These motifs suggest borders and the separation of spaces—as if the viewer is variably positioned both outside of nature and within it.
Norris’ imagery often turns upon reversal. A depiction of one thing implies its opposite: exteriors suggest interiors, mass hints at void and—materially—concave vessels produce convex surfaces Through these paradoxes, perception becomes active: the viewer does not simply look, but negotiates the shifts between presence and absence.
The abstraction in Norris’ work is not impressionistic in the sense of recording appearances. Instead, it is recollective—shaped by the artist’s relationship with place. Much of his youth was spent wandering through the forests of the Lake District in Cumbria, and more recently he has found a similarly formative presence in Epping Forest in London. This may explain why the natural world permeates his practice: not as an accurate representation, but as a translation of feeling—what it means to be there, and what remains when memory edits the scene.
A key aspect of Norris’ approach is the way it assigns importance. As Katherine Jones RA writes: “In Norris’ work, small, incidental observations seem to be given as much emphasis as the grandiose. This produces a harmony that seems to clarify a unique ‘earthy’ feeling. In striving to reach something essential he edits the memory of the forest or garden. Dreams and memories of natural space and growth collected on frequent woodland walks are unearthed and reconfigured in the artist’s studio. Perhaps the brutalist architecture of Norris’ urban surroundings – the concrete, linear nature of South East London – sharpens his responses to the contrast of wilderness.”
This “earthy” harmony emerges from a careful editorial process. In Norris’ studio, experiences from woodland walks—brief, incidental, even dreamlike—are reconfigured rather than reproduced. The result is a body of work where memory itself becomes material: gathered, edited, and redistributed across vessel surfaces.
Jones RA’s final point adds another layer. Norris’ urban surroundings—particularly the brutalist architecture and linear concrete qualities of South East London—may intensify his responses to wilderness. Rather than softening the contrast between city and nature, the architecture sharpens it, making the dialogue between built structure and organic growth more pronounced. Hard-edged forms and structured colour blocks do not compete with nature; they frame it. The vessels become places where both environments are present at once—grown memory shaped by architectural constraint.
Ultimately, Norris’ work exemplifies the enduring power of ceramic and paint as expressive media. Jennifer Guerrini Maraldi observes: “Tom’s work exemplifies the enduring qualities of ceramic and paint. He is an artist whose conception of his surrounding is as timeless as the materials he represents them with.”
For JGM Gallery, publications such as The JGM Review provide an essential continuation of the exhibition experience—offering collectors, visitors, and friends an expanded context for understanding how artists like Tom Norris transform perception into objects you can live with and return to.
Photo credits: JGM Gallery
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