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.
Moira is based in a small village on the edge of the Blackwater Estuary Coast. After a career in Marketing Communications, Moira studied 3D art specialising in ceramics at Colchester Adult College gaining a City and Guilds Diploma.
Moira’s vessels are contemplative and tactile, and strongly influenced by sense of place - the soft Essex saltings landscape, the quality of East Coast light, and the fleeting and ever-changing nature of life between the tidelines.
Doug works in red earthenware clay, the pots simply decorated, with appliqué decoration or sgraffito, using a basic palette of traditional slips that are made from natural raw materials. The majority of his pots are thrown on the wheel with some press moulded dishes, decorated with freely trailed lines.
Claudia trained as a painter but transferred to pots because she found the turning surface sympathetic to an unfolding visual narrative. Stories are her raw material - both her own and other people's, also fictional stories, songs, and poetry. The human, cultural, and historic associations of pottery connect particularly well to the work she does interpreting women’s histories and contemporary lives. The nature of pots is that they can break, and so can be mended. This she finds to be a compelling metaphor for both trauma and survival - the mending has an optimistic quality.
Loretta began her practice in ceramics via a career in graphic arts, textile design and sculpture. During pregnancy, she found working on sculptural forms too heavy and moved across to ceramics. That was the start of her fascination with the medium as it allows her the freedom to explore her enduring passions of form, colour, texture and mark-making.
Jane Hamlyn's life as a full-time professional potter began in 1975. She chose to work in salt-glaze, an unpredictable technique with a short history and undiscovered potential.
Her work captures her imaginary life and real life, which overlap. She used to pretend to live as a ‘normal’ person in society but wildness took over the thin veneer and it consumed her. Once she started making sculpture, all those layers of pretention fell away. She was finally one whole person.
