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.
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.
Informing and framing his ceramic practice are a range of sources including the processes of walking the coast, swimming along its shore, gathering objects, materials and studying its intertidal ecology and geology. Images, motifs and gestural marks brushed or drawn into the surface of both his functional pots and the sculptural vessels can be seen as direct traces of his phenomenological experience.
Maria's early creative training and work was in graphic design at a time when the industry was changing from drawing boards to computers. As her work became more computer based she realised she missed using her hands and making things, that realisation led to ceramics, initially experimenting in a shed in her garden, but later to an MA in ceramic design at Bath Spa University. Since graduating she has exhibited nationally and internationally and now works from her studio in Frome.
Gilles makes a variety of functional and one –off thrown stoneware pieces. His forms are freely manipulated on the potter’s wheel, some are altered and joined to construct taller larger pieces, other have incised marks applied to the soft clay revealing a subtle and tactile quality to the work, carrying a sense of captured sculptural movement.
Björk’s professional background is in Architecture and her work remains unequivocally architectural to her eyes and is influenced by her training and profession in many ways. However, natural forms reflecting her upbringing in Iceland and exposure to the extraordinary in nature are also reference points.
David was born in South London and trained in Graphics and 3D design. After working in art education for many years, specialising in ceramics, he took early retirement to concentrate on his own work and established his own workshop in the Forest of Dean where he now produces a range of hand-built ceramics.
