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.
The careful traditions of English slipware are unseated and then thoroughly reworked through the ceramics of Dylan Bowen who has taken this English inheritance and very definitely made it his own.
All Francis' work is thrown using stoneware clays and is reduction fired, increasingly turning to salt glaze for his desired surface. Functional pots are his main concern, pots made for use in daily life, often giving a nod towards other historical objects, not necessarily made of clay, featuring utilitarian components now ultimately defunct but repurposed as decoration. He uses a muted palette of glazes and seeks a balance between looseness and definition in his forms.
Since 2000 Owen Thorpe has been producing ‘families’ of pots using recurring themes and he has been making bowls and plates with inscriptions. All his work is made using a soft stoneware, high fired with occasional further enamel firings.
Jo specialises in wheel-thrown porcelain and works from her studio in Hackney, East London. Her practice includes hand-making a fine porcelain design range, lighting and unique objects. Her individual approach to wheel-thrown ceramics, where high-fired porcelain often appears paradoxically to be fresh off the wheel, balances softness with rigidity, smoothness with weight and tactility.
Helen Beard is a potter and illustrator and a people watcher at heart. She studied at the Edinburgh College of Art. After graduating, Helen was an apprentice with Edmund de Waal in London. She set up her own studio in 2004 in the London borough of Islington where she makes, draws, designs and sometimes teaches.
Before Tony established his own studio in 1988, he studied ceramics and then worked in the ceramic industry in Stoke on Trent (including as a designer for Coalport China, part of Wedgwood). His background in the industry gave him a broad appreciation of ceramics and techniques. He is interested in the art ware produced by Royal Doulton in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but also fascinated by the work of French potters such as Clement Massier.
