Championing the very best independent ceramic makers for over 60 years

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.

 

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Meet Our Makers

All of our makers are members of the Craft Potters Association and each of them have a story to tell.

Jane Perryman

For this new exhibition, Jane will be showing a group of hemispherical double walled bowls mixed with different organic and man-made materials collected randomly, each a metaphor for memory and words. Using combinations of press moulding, coiling and slabbing processes before burnishing the surface, her pieces are then low fired and then refined with sandpaper followed by a higher temperature firing. 

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John Calver

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.

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Chris Barnes

Chris was born in 1959. His introduction to clay began at adult education classes in Islington. He went on to study Sculpture at St. Martins School of Art, London and graduated in 1982. Chris has moved around the country over the last decades. He helped set up the Chocolate Factory studios in Hackney, London in 1995. In 2006, he moved to Argyll, Scotland to set up another pottery. By 2009, Chris relocated to Cumbria setting up a new pottery in a converted farm building.

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Carina Ciscato

Carina trained as an industrial designer in Germany and specialised in furniture design. One day she found herself at a ceramic studio near her house. She had a sudden realisation that there was no difference between making a teapot or a chair because it's all about aesthetics: form, function, balance, and proportion.

Carina had no formal ceramic education and through apprenticeship, short courses, and residencies she has learned and worked with different clays in different parts of the world. She explores the potential and qualities of each clay body, a continuous conversation unfolding between the maker and the material.

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Karen Downing

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.

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Ostinelli and Priest

Gaynor Ostinelli and Paul Priest, or Ostinelli & Priest, are well known for their animal sculptures which draw on both domestic and wildlife. Exhibited around the world, their work is represented in numerous galleries, public and private collections in the UK and overseas. The animals they sculpt varies as their subjects, and the demand for the work, expands.

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