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.
Kay Aplin graduated in 1995 from Chelsea College of Art, specialising in ceramics and glass. Since then, Kay has had a successful career as an architectural ceramist, producing a distinct range of site-specific commissions for the public realm around the UK and internationally.
Gaby’s current focus is making saggar-fired, wheel-thrown pots. What originally drew her to this type of making was the interplay between the highly controlled form, and smooth, polished, surface texture of the piece on the one hand; and the ‘seemingly’ random nature of the surface marks created by smoke and metallic, chemical reactions, on the other.
Agalis Manessi is a ceramic artist working from studios in London and Corfu, where she was born. After studying ceramics at the Central School of Art & Design, she was inspired by the teachings of Gordon Baldwin, Eileen Nisbett and Dan Arbeid who encouraged her enthusiasm for the plastic qualities of terracotta clay. After graduation she set up a studio in Hackney where she was a founding member of Broadway Ceramics and taught in further education. In 2018 she relocated her studio to Kennington in south London.
Sasha Wardell has been working in bone china since 1982. Her formal training in ceramics included both undergraduate and postgraduate degrees and industrial training secondments to L’Ecole Nationale des Arts Decoratifs, Limoges, France, and the Royal Doulton design studio, Stoke on Trent, UK.
An industrial approach to the traditional bone china manufacturing process has strongly influenced the way in which Sasha presently works, reflecting her fascination for methods and materials which present a challenge. It is for this reason that bone china, with all its idiosyncrasies, has remained her favourite material.
David had no artistic or ceramic history in his family, nor did he formally study ceramics. He discovered ceramics by accident as an element in his teaching degree whilst at Bretton Hall in the late 1960s. Similarly, his work in raku was appropriately the result of a serendipitous encounter with an American raku potter in the mid-1970s. David states that due to persistence, natural talent and support from colleagues, friends, and family, especially his wife Jan, over the past 40 years he has established himself as a leading international practitioner in raku ceramics.
Robyn creates finely thrown vessels in porcelain, for both decoration and use. She is inspired by the combination of delicacy and strength in porcelain. She creates pieces whose pared-back forms evoke a sense of balance and harmony, whether in a bowl wide open to the skies or a moon jar in its spherical containment. Surface decoration is minimal - an incised line around a narrow foot, or a slip decoration to add a dynamic to the stillness of a moon jar.
