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.
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.
Taja came over to UK from his native country Japan to study oil painting and settled in Devon over 40 years ago. He was inspired by so many potters in the south west, so he started making pots using his friend’s pottery workshop. He is largely self-taught. He found that slab and coil built pottery suits him the most. He started experimenting with porcelain clay about 20 years ago after being inspired by enormous blue porcelain wall tiles at a new Japanese airport especially the water-like quality of the blue glaze.
Karen throws carefully considered porcelain pots for everyday use. Her forms are elegant yet robust: these are pots to be held, filled, drunk out of and eaten from. The purposeful use of one material (porcelain), a single creamy white glaze, a deliberately restricted vocabulary of form and the process of repetition throwing combine to create both unity and diversity in her work.
Clare Conrad's work is an exploration of colour and texture, inspired by the effects of light and ageing on architecture, artefacts and landscape. Her technique of layering vitreous slip onto wheel-thrown vessels, vases and bowls creates a rugged texture.
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.
With her figures Sally creates personalities that share a sense of warmth and calm. Drawing from early memories of family gatherings spilling across summer lawns; the quiet intimacy of a confidence shared between sisters; expressions of visual anecdotes carefully collected and stored to later emerge as a figure. The everyday moments of human interaction being elevated from the ordinary into something special.