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.
Despite specialising in making one-off slab-built pots during her college years, Ulla established herself as a ceramic jewellery maker for many years. She has however, returned to making individual sculptural pieces. The pots that she now makes are a playful take on classic container forms, particularly the bottle. The shapes have an animated, even anthropomorphic air about them and work well in pairs or in groups.
Tessa trained in Ceramics at Goldsmiths College, London 1981-84. On leaving college she developed a method of sawdust firing for surfaces that were high fired and internally glazed making it possible for them to hold water. Her vessel ranges are both hand-built and slip-cast, sculptural in form but always functional.
Inspired by her grandmother’s Willow Pattern collection, Rhian Malin continues the long historic tradition of hand-painting porcelain with cobalt-blue decoration. Her elegant wheel-thrown porcelain vessels are the chosen surface, created to stretch this tradition into the 21st Century.
Sasha Wardell has been working in bone china since 1982. Her formal training in ceramics included both undergraduate and postgraduate degrees and industrial training secondments to L’Ecole Nationale des Arts Decoratifs, Limoges, France, and the Royal Doulton design studio, Stoke on Trent, UK.
An industrial approach to the traditional bone china manufacturing process has strongly influenced the way in which Sasha presently works, reflecting her fascination for methods and materials which present a challenge. It is for this reason that bone china, with all its idiosyncrasies, has remained her favourite material.
Phil throws and hand-builds in various stoneware clays, making bowls, vases and sculptural forms. However, his main output is concentrated on small-scale porcelain and white stoneware bowls and bottles. They are exclusively hand thrown.
Moira is based in a small village on the edge of the Blackwater Estuary Coast. After a career in Marketing Communications, Moira studied 3D art specialising in ceramics at Colchester Adult College gaining a City and Guilds Diploma.
Moira’s vessels are contemplative and tactile, and strongly influenced by sense of place - the soft Essex saltings landscape, the quality of East Coast light, and the fleeting and ever-changing nature of life between the tidelines.
