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.
John has been making stoneware pottery in the North Lancashire village of Yealand Redmayne for forty years. The firing process requires a temperature of 1320c, and a smoky/reducing atmosphere in the kiln, which results in rich glaze colours and exciting unpredictable effects on the pots. Most of the pots are classically simple functional shapes, thrown on the wheel, but John occasionally alters the freshly thrown pots to produce one of the signature forms for which he is well known.
Born and raised in London, Diane graduated with a BA (Hons) in ceramics in 1988. It was during her foundation course in the 1980s that she fell in love with clay. It lit her up, and her lifelong passion began. Initially she was drawn to how immediate, tactile and responsive it was, but it was during her degree at Farnham that she discovered how truly versatile clay is as a creative medium for artistic expression.
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.
Inspired by her grandmother’s Willow Pattern collection, Rhian Malin continues the long historic tradition of hand-painting porcelain with cobalt-blue decoration. Her elegant wheel-thrown porcelain vessels are the chosen surface, created to stretch this tradition into the 21st Century.
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.
“Chivers is an artist potter whose work shines with a flowing lyricism in which decoration is intrinsically linked to form but is equally linked to natural random processes of image formation of the kind favoured by the American Abstract Expressionists and the European ‘matter’ painters.” Peter Davies.
