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.
Working with clay allows Sue a secondary voice, a line of communication through form. Her work explores the fragility and hidden strength found within the natural world.
The slow repetitive hand-building techniques she uses to create her pieces offer a considered way to develop the work as each piece calmly grows. Deliberate junctions are made by breaking and re-joining the form where collars or shoulders then evolve. Surface markings are infused into the work during the making, with slips and oxides being applied throughout the drying stage. Built with a white stoneware clay body, the work may be glazed or left bare.
Elly graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2004. Since then, she has exhibited in numerous galleries and craft fairs. She produces work from her garden studio in Hertford.
Elly’s work is hand-built using slabs of clay with multiple slips, textural marks and impressions applied during the making process. Glaze is also applied and sometimes rubbed back, then the pieces are high fired.
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.
All Francis' work is thrown using stoneware clays and is reduction fired, increasingly turning to salt glaze for his desired surface. Functional pots are his main concern, pots made for use in daily life, often giving a nod towards other historical objects, not necessarily made of clay, featuring utilitarian components now ultimately defunct but repurposed as decoration. He uses a muted palette of glazes and seeks a balance between looseness and definition in his forms.
John left art school in 1970 and dug trenches for gas pipes for a living. Later, through his college friend’s brother (who was a potter) John worked for David Frith in North Wales. He found the discipline hard, but it has stood him in good stead ever since.
Birgit Pohl grew up in Germany and porcelain objects in her family home always held a particular fascination. After moving to London, a chance visit to a potter’s studio first opened her eyes to the possibilities of working with porcelain. She learned how to throw on the wheel initially at evening classes and went on to study at Clay College, Stoke-on-Trent.
