Ashley Howard is an award winning ceramic artist and dedicated teacher creating porcelain vessels informed by Far-Eastern and homespun pottery traditions. Ashley’s work draws from his interest in ritual vessels, the spaces they occupy and the ceremonies that surround them.
Primarily throwing his work on the wheel, while sometimes applying varying degrees of manipulation and altering, Ashley uses surface techniques he has developed over the years to decorate his work by drawing, brushing and printing with enamels. His unique approach to surface decoration is captured by Adrian Bland who writes ‘Howard himself has spoken of his early reticence with regard to decoration, his holding back from being a ‘potter that paints’ (Howard, 2018), and for some time his idiosyncratic mark making remained bound within the sketchbook. Such reticence was perhaps first confronted technically, with research into the right materials and processes, the right temperatures, to push the mark-making into the pot, so that the surface is not sitting on the form, but rather becomes integral to it, and the pot retains a ceramic integrity that somewhat refutes the notion of clay as canvas; ‘the glaze has pulled the marks right in’ (Howard, 2018)’
Initially studying at what is now known as the University for the Creative Arts, Rochester, Ashley has built a career combining teaching with making. Studying his Masters at the Royal College of Art in 2001, he has since published numerous articles on technical and aesthetic subjects.
“The motion, movement and rhythm of the potters wheel have always been an experiential influence on my making. This exhibition represents a stage in my continuing enquiring into the relationship between form and surface.” – Ashley Howard
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Lara Scobie is an Edinburgh based ceramic artist specialising in individual slip-cast vessels and bowls made in porcelain and parian clay. Focusing on the dynamic between form and pattern her work explores the cohesive integration of drawing, surface, mark making and volume. The off-center ellipses of the individual forms echo line drawings and decoration applied to the painted surfaces.
“The theme of balance is a constant, significantly underlining my current work in which ideas of dynamic interplay between form and surface develop.” – Lara Scobie
Sue’s work draws on the quiet resilience of trees and bones—forms shaped by time, marked by fragility and carrying memories of growth and decay. Through slow, receptive hand-building, each piece develops as if guided by an internal rhythm. Textured surfaces hold lines like weathered stories, while a soft matte glaze evokes a sense of calmness.
‘My hurt, my joy, my scars, my healing, all shape the work I create in clay.’ – Sue Mundy
Jenny Southam hand builds figurative sculptures in terracotta clay. She delights in exploring colourful gestural mark-making over their surfaces. This painterly decoration aims to echo the emotional resonance of each piece.
“When I enter the studio I am searching for that serene state of absolute absorption that making and drawing can gift us, which we all wish will, in some manner, enrich our audience.” – Jenny Southam
In a career spanning nearly 50 years, ceramicist, Sophie MacCarthy has developed a unique and distinctive personal style. Through her subtle and bold use of coloured slips, painterly brushwork, stencils and wax-resist, she evokes the colours, forms and movements of the passing seasons. Often focusing on the ground, she finds beauty in the accidental compositions created by wind-blown leaves, stalks and detritus sometimes gathered around a storm drain or scattered over concrete and tarmac, juxtaposing the vibrant colours of the natural world with the gritty textures of the urban environment.
‘She has a poetic insight into the natural world’ David Whiting
Throughout his long career Peter has always sought pathways to the development of new ideas. Often this is a slow process, but sometimes a particular event speeds things along.
Partaking of two residencies in China recently, where Peter worked in porcelain at high temperatures, led him to develop a new body of work, made alongside his existing practice to which Peter is still deeply committed.
This new exhibition represents the outcome of Peter’s working practice.
'This exhibition explores objects that express a quiet equilibrium: fragile, shifting forms that exist in a state of delicate imbalance. Their stillness is easily disturbed, as if the act of holding too tightly might cause something essential to disappear. The works reflect an interest in forms that resist perfection, remaining slightly unresolved, unsettled, and quietly alive.' Akiko Hirai