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.
Irena Sibrijns has been a potter for over thirty years. Inspired by an avid interest in 20th century English decorative arts tradition Irena creates exquisite, and entirely unique, ornamental and functional pieces with equal enthusiasm.
Sue originally trained as a sculptor at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London gaining a degree in Fine Art (Sculpture). First working in wood and metal, she discovered clay in the late nineties.
A chance encounter with a South African potter led to Sue’s fascination with burnished and smoked African and South American pots. Then in 1997, she attended a transformative course in Greece run by ceramic artist Alan Bain. There she began hand-building pots, working with terra sigillata slips, acquiring burnishing skills, and being introduced to pit firing.
Sean's love of slipware first began whilst attending the studio pottery course at Harrow College of Art in the late 1980s. Now 30 years and three workshops later he is still making slipware. Since 2007, after moving from London, Sean has been working in an old converted stone barn in Southern Brittany, France.
Jenny Southam studied Fine Art in Bristol where she developed her practice in Sculpture, gravitating towards bronze. After several years working as a sculptor and bronze-casting assistant in Gloucestershire she moved to Devon, where she embraced clay as her medium of choice. For thirty years her family, home, garden and studio has formed an integrated whole.
Working with clay allows Sue a secondary voice, a line of communication through form. Her work explores the fragility and hidden strength found within the natural world.
The slow repetitive hand-building techniques she uses to create her pieces offer a considered way to develop the work as each piece calmly grows. Deliberate junctions are made by breaking and re-joining the form where collars or shoulders then evolve. Surface markings are infused into the work during the making, with slips and oxides being applied throughout the drying stage. Built with a white stoneware clay body, the work may be glazed or left bare.
John discovered ceramics while still at school in his native New Zealand. He was also inspired by watching a neighbour throwing a pot on the wheel and that cemented the desire to learn more. After attending night classes to learn the basic, he built a kiln and shed in the back garden to continue making and experimenting.
