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.
Marcio Mattos became fascinated with clay after seeing an exhibition of tea ceremony bowls at the V&A museum many years ago. He went on to train at Richmond College and later for a degree at Goldsmiths College. He presently creates one-off sculptural vessels and plaques in black stoneware and porcelain paper clay with dry-glazed textural surfaces and brushed decoration.
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.
Inspired by her grandmother’s Willow Pattern collection, Rhian Malin continues the long historic tradition of hand-painting porcelain with cobalt-blue decoration. Her elegant wheel-thrown porcelain vessels are the chosen surface, created to stretch this tradition into the 21st Century.
Jonathan graduated from Farnham Art School in 1974 and worked for Joe Finch at Appin Pottery in Scotland. He began making once fired domestic ware in a pale stoneware body, guided and inspired by Bernard Leach’s ‘A Potters Book’. He went on to work in porcelain and to decorate with a brush.
In 1999, Jonathan moved to East Sussex where he built a smaller kiln in a more spacious workshop. He began to experiment seriously with reduction fired lustre which had fascinated him ever since he attended a course given by the late Marjorie Clinton two years previously.
Sandy Brown has been making ceramics now for over 50 years and is internationally known. After being introduced to ceramics in Japan, Sandy learned there that pots can be dynamic, exciting, free, and irregular. Moreover, they can be loved and used for those qualities.
The Peak District Pennine landscape and seasons are the backdrop to everything Timothy does. He makes pottery on the border between function and sculpture: in essence vases, bowls, bottles and cups, though these are really just what he calls 'serving suggestions'. His work is multiple-fired, often starting with the wood kiln and ending with lustres.
