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.
Ben’s work is mainly hand-built, wheel-thrown and altered using stoneware, porcelain, and high fired earthenware clays. Forms seek to utilise and respond to the malleability of the material with work being altered and assembled while still wet.
The majority of his work relies exclusively on the interaction between ash, clay and fire achieved through extended wood firings in an anagama type kiln. However, recent pieces are exploring the potentials of using earthenware clays to bring out the character and attitude in the work.
Since leaving Camberwell College of Art in 1988, Justine has been primarily working with hand-built porcelain. Her work addresses the boundaries between function and decoration. Form is paramount to her, function is a driving motivation, but it is the aesthetics of a piece that are key to her making.
With both of her parents being artists, Kerry’s childhood was surrounded by paintings, sculpture, and architecture. They had a potter friend and spent quiet hours in her studio. She went on to gain a BA Hons Ceramics at University of Westminster.
Kerry is inspired by the making process itself, using clay as a way of exploring her relationship to the world as a maker. She seeks creative strategies analogous to those found in nature such as growth, metamorphosis, and fragmentation.
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.
Many years ago, Harriet was inspired by an article by Dick Lehmann about carbon trap glazes. She has been exploring this intriguing glaze ever since. She believes that all the potters who work with carbon trap seek different qualities and achieve quite distinctive effects even though they may use the same recipe and fire to the same temperature in the same kind of kiln. The glaze is unusually responsive to the atmosphere in the kiln and even to the weather as it dries before firing.