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.
Priscilla was born in Cape Town, South Africa and attended the School of Art in Durban before setting up her own ceramic studio in England in 1968. She spent a decade in England before moving to Denmark where she has lived and worked since.
Priscilla makes porcelain pinch pots with graphic surface etchings revealed in underglaze. Her monochrome pots are often wood-fired.
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.
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.
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.
Lea Phillips makes a wide range high fired stoneware pottery, mostly functional plus some larger one-off pieces. All the ceramics are wheel-thrown, fired in an electric kiln and decorated with free abstract designs using vibrant colourful glazes made to her own recipes. A firm believer that oxidised firing is no barrier to interesting surfaces Lea enjoys glaze development and the challenge of combining form, colour, and pattern.
Martin describes his work as ‘ Clay – Water – Wood – Fire – Space’. These five elements are synthesised to create a reversed trompe-l’œil type of work, seemingly excavated or revealed, and simultaneously diminishing the third dimension.
