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.
Micki makes wood-fired salt-glazed tableware, fired to a high stoneware temperature. Travelling in India in 1968, Micki came across their ubiquitous everyday earthenware pots. She loved the connection between the earth and the pots and was introduced to throwing on a Leach wheel by Gurcharan Singh of Delhi Blue Potteries.
John has been making stoneware pottery in the North Lancashire village of Yealand Redmayne for forty years. The firing process requires a temperature of 1320c, and a smoky/reducing atmosphere in the kiln, which results in rich glaze colours and exciting unpredictable effects on the pots. Most of the pots are classically simple functional shapes, thrown on the wheel, but John occasionally alters the freshly thrown pots to produce one of the signature forms for which he is well known.
“Chivers is an artist potter whose work shines with a flowing lyricism in which decoration is intrinsically linked to form but is equally linked to natural random processes of image formation of the kind favoured by the American Abstract Expressionists and the European ‘matter’ painters.” Peter Davies.
Rachel Grimshaw’s sculptural ceramics are about the clay itself. Focusing on its pliable, immediate, qualities, Rachel likens her pieces to photographs capturing a ‘frozen moment’ in time, her pieces are fixed in a forever gesture once fired.
Akiko Hirai produces both practical and decorative ceramic ware that is held in private collections and museums worldwide. Her Japanese background and aesthetics strongly influence her ceramic work while her pieces are also perfectly rooted in contemporary designs.
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.
