Contemporary Ceramics gallery and shop exhibits the greatest collectable names in British ceramics along with the most up and coming artists of today. Our distinguished makers are all carefully selected members of the Craft Potters Association.
All of our makers are members of the Craft Potters Association and each of them have a story to tell.
Alastair has a lifetime of experience as an artist/maker, teacher, mentor, and plantsman. He was taught by Emmanuel Cooper, Walter Keeler, Dan Arbeid, Richard Slee, Mo Jupp, Robert Kesseler, Gillian Lowndes, and Gordon Baldwin, etc. Gillian and Gordon in particular were pivotal in transfoming his thinking and ambition.
Having enjoyed making from a young age, Jo completed a degree in jewellery and silversmithing at Edinburgh College of Art before embarking on a career in retail management. It wasn’t until her children started school that she enrolled in a pottery course, where what had begun as a hobby quickly became an obsession. Jo works from her home studio in Fife, producing wheel-thrown and hand-built ceramics decorated using the sgraffito technique. Her inspiration comes from two distinct strands: nature - particularly wild plants - and mid-century architecture and pattern. The botanical pieces celebrate weeds that are often overlooked or disdained, allowing their architectural beauty to shine, while the geometric designs explore a detailed interplay of pattern and form, resulting in complex, graphic surfaces. Jo works from her home studio in Fife, producing wheel-thrown and hand-built ceramics decorated using the sgraffito technique. Her inspiration comes from two distinct strands: nature - particularly wild plants, and mid-century architecture and pattern. The botanical pieces celebrate weeds that are often overlooked or disdained, allowing their architectural beauty to shine, while the geometric designs explore a detailed interplay of pattern and form, resulting in complex, graphic surfaces.
Shirley has been making things for as long as she can remember. With a background in textiles and a degree in Surface Decoration from Leicester Polytechnic, her early fascination with ceramics began while visiting the ceramics department, which felt to her like an alchemist’s world. Years later, during a period of personal change, she joined an evening hand-building course and was immediately drawn to clay. What began as a source of calm and focus has since developed into an intuitive, largely self-taught practice.
Erum entered ceramics through an unconventional path, beginning her professional life as a physicist before transitioning into a creative practice. While she later received formal ceramic training, much of her development has been self-directed, allowing her to integrate scientific observation with material exploration.
Ben’s work is mainly hand-built, wheel-thrown and altered using stoneware, porcelain, and high fired earthenware clays. Forms seek to utilise and respond to the malleability of the material with work being altered and assembled while still wet. The majority of his work relies exclusively on the interaction between ash, clay and fire achieved through extended wood firings in an anagama type kiln. However, recent pieces are exploring the potentials of using earthenware clays to bring out the character and attitude in the work.
The functional wheel-thrown pots that Carl creates are modest but highly considered and precisely made, sometimes altered when wet, often with spontaneous, energetic surface marks. Everything is conceived in the knowledge that his work will be wood-fired.