Jonathan Chiswell-Jones

Jonathan graduated from Farnham Art School in 1974 and worked for Joe Finch at Appin Pottery in Scotland. He began making once fired domestic ware in a pale stoneware body, guided and inspired by Bernard Leach’s ‘A Potters Book’. He went on to work in porcelain and to decorate with a brush.

In 1999, Jonathan moved to East Sussex where he built a smaller kiln in a more spacious workshop. He began to experiment seriously with reduction fired lustre which had fascinated him ever since he attended a course given by the late Marjorie Clinton two years previously.

This now absorbs most of his attention. It provides challenges at every stage of the process. The last firing during which nano particles of silver and of copper are deposited in the glaze and reflect light, can provide joy and frustration in equal measure. Aside from the magic of lustre firings, there is the wonder of endless possibilities to be discovered down a path which might seem to the outsider both narrow and constrained.

He loves working in a thousand year old tradition which has roots in the Middle East, flowered  in Moorish Spain and 19^th century Europe, was revived in this country by Alan Caiger-Smith, and today provides a glittering thread to those determined enough to pick it up and carry it, as the spirit takes them, into the future.