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.
As a child, Jon loved drawing and messing about with mud. He and his brother and friends spent many joyful years roaming and exploring on the waste ground of empty housing plots. The exposed seams of soft yellow clay they discovered was perfect for making ‘weapons’ - squashed balls of clay on the ends of sticks. Although childhood has long passed, the activity has informed and inspired his approach to ceramic practice and his educational/community engagement work.
Jemma’s work explores the way that girls are generally constrained from birth to conform to an appearance and code of behaviour, to present a perfect face and maintain the expectations of others. The use of porcelain or stoneware with layered disrupted surfaces, describe the vulnerability beneath.
Patia studied at Harrow College of Further Education 1986 – 1988 and subsequently spent a further two years at Cardiff School of Art and Design from 1998 – 1990. During her time at Harrow and Cardiff she was tutored by Mick Casson, which after her graduation led to an invitation by Mick and Sheila Casson to join the team at Wobage in 1990. This is where Patia continues to work today in her own workshop making slip decorated earthenware and high-fired ash and feldspathic glazed porcelain. Patia was made a Fellow of the CPA in 2015, and has exhibited in the UK, Japan and Europe.
Paul studied studio ceramics under renowned ceramic sculptor, Mo Jupp at Harrow School of Art, graduating in 1977. Following a short period teaching in London, he relocated to Cornwall, where he established his pottery in 1979. He moved to his present home at Helland Bridge, where he works in a studio converted from an old chapel, in 1989.
Making in her hometown of Stoke-on-Trent, Laura draws from the creative heritage and ambition of the pioneering potters who made the city famous. Her contemporary forms echo the grandeur of 18th century ceramics, she has long admired. Thrown in porcelain, each piece is a unique ‘sketch’ in clay, carefully turned and refined to reveal the precise form.
Being brought up close to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park has been a gift and an education to James from a very young age. The aesthetic of Barbara Hepworth’s work is almost ingrained in him, as though it were the basis of his consciousness of texture, proportion, line and form. After completing a foundation course at Dewsbury Art College, James spent two weeks in the ceramics department working with renowned Raku Ceramist David Roberts. He was immediately drawn to clay as a material. Later, upon graduation from Loughborough and then the Royal College of Art in 2001, James set up a studio in London for several years before returning to his native Yorkshire in 2005.