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.
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.
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.
Gaby’s current focus is making saggar-fired, wheel-thrown pots. What originally drew her to this type of making was the interplay between the highly controlled form, and smooth, polished, surface texture of the piece on the one hand; and the ‘seemingly’ random nature of the surface marks created by smoke and metallic, chemical reactions, on the other.
After studying glass and ceramics at the University of Sunderland, Craig completed an MA in ceramics at the Royal College of Art. He was drawn to clay for the immediacy of its modelling properties, enabling him to realise his ideas with dynamism. His work is inspired by the elegance of a bygone era, particularly the work of cartoonists and illustrators from the 50s and 60s such as Miroslav Sasek and Ronald Searle, whose economic use of line define characters and tell stories.
Born and brought up in Norwich, Richard has been making pots since the early 1970s. After studying for two years at Great Yarmouth College of Art, he worked from 1974 to 1980 at Le Dieu Pottery in Norwich before spending 3 years in Australia and New Zealand, and a further five in Germany.
He is inspired by Hungarian and Romanian slipware from the 1800s and by English country pottery. Recently his work has explored colour and abstract patterns in strong forms that capture the ebb and flow of the sea and the landscape of South West Dorset.
Prue is a member of the Art Workers’ Guild, where she was Master in 2014. Her work sells widely, in the UK, USA and Japan, and she has been given numerous solo shows. Prue makes press-moulded earthenware dishes, decorated with quotations and images illustrating the ways of the world – witty, friendly or subversive.
