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.
David had no artistic or ceramic history in his family, nor did he formally study ceramics. He discovered ceramics by accident as an element in his teaching degree whilst at Bretton Hall in the late 1960s. Similarly, his work in raku was appropriately the result of a serendipitous encounter with an American raku potter in the mid-1970s. David states that due to persistence, natural talent and support from colleagues, friends, and family, especially his wife Jan, over the past 40 years he has established himself as a leading international practitioner in raku ceramics.
Irena Sibrijns has been a potter for over thirty years. Inspired by an avid interest in 20th century English decorative arts tradition Irena creates exquisite, and entirely unique, ornamental and functional pieces with equal enthusiasm.
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.
Duncan Ross makes thrown and burnished vessels using many layers of fine terra-sigillata slip with resist and inlay decoration. His work is represented in many public and private collections around the world, notably the V & A and Fitzwilliam Museums in the UK, the American Museum of Ceramic Art in Pomona, California and the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina, US.
Robyn creates finely thrown vessels in porcelain, for both decoration and use. She is inspired by the combination of delicacy and strength in porcelain. She creates pieces whose pared-back forms evoke a sense of balance and harmony, whether in a bowl wide open to the skies or a moon jar in its spherical containment. Surface decoration is minimal - an incised line around a narrow foot, or a slip decoration to add a dynamic to the stillness of a moon jar.
Barbara Gittings’ smoke fired, nerikomi porcelain vessels are quiet, contemplative and sensual, as she wants anyone looking at the work to want to touch it and be drawn in.