Kyra Cane grew up in the small Nottinghamshire town of Southwell in the East Midlands and attended Camberwell College of Art and Craft in the early 1980’s to study ceramics. After becoming course leader on the famous Harrow ceramics course, Kyra now works from her studio based on the Welbeck Estate, Nottingham. She is the chair of the board of trustees for the Craft Potters Charitable Trust and still teaches short courses, most notably for West Dean College of Arts.
“I cannot remember a time when I was not drawing or making something, I discovered and fell in love with clay at the age of nine at school and have continued along this path ever since.” – Kyra Cane
Creating her work by throwing on the wheel, each of her pieces demand her undivided attention. Noting the speed at which decisions are made as the most exciting experience in the making process, Kyra enjoys forming fine walled structures from solid lumps of clay in one soft fluid process.
Using Limoges porcelain for its colour, both when raw and fired, and its strength in the heat of the kiln Kyra draws on the surface, responding to the shape and nature of each piece. While wrapping bold, ostensibly black marks, around the porcelain forms, she animates and defines spaces; creating brush marks which fade and blur with inky opaque bands that change hue.
Creating pots that each hold their own voice, Kyra engraves lines, defines and redefines marks and edges until each vessel displays vast landscapes. Drawings of the places she has been to fill her sketchbooks and it is these landscapes that inspire her work.
“My continuous interest in vessels means that pots are my great love. They link one to a history of making objects, from the china painted bowl I found and treasured as a child and the early Persian bowls with simple patterns that I admire, to the battered metal containers that hang on my studio wall. They are part of a consistent thread of influences which include paintings, and an appreciation of that which is made by hand.” – Kyra Cane
