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.
Kay Aplin graduated in 1995 from Chelsea College of Art, specialising in ceramics and glass. Since then, Kay has had a successful career as an architectural ceramist, producing a distinct range of site-specific commissions for the public realm around the UK and internationally.
As a child, Jon loved drawing and messing about with mud. He and his brother and friends spent many joyful years roaming and exploring on the waste ground of empty housing plots. The exposed seams of soft yellow clay they discovered was perfect for making ‘weapons’ - squashed balls of clay on the ends of sticks. Although childhood has long passed, the activity has informed and inspired his approach to ceramic practice and his educational/community engagement work.
Inspired by a Chinese bottle gifted to her as a child, each piece Carolyn makes assumes its own identity with the application of transferred decoration. Collected imagery and text tell stories from lives past and present centring around the human condition and covering themes both significant and trivial.
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.
John has been making stoneware pottery in the North Lancashire village of Yealand Redmayne for forty years. The firing process requires a temperature of 1320c, and a smoky/reducing atmosphere in the kiln, which results in rich glaze colours and exciting unpredictable effects on the pots. Most of the pots are classically simple functional shapes, thrown on the wheel, but John occasionally alters the freshly thrown pots to produce one of the signature forms for which he is well known.
Loretta began her practice in ceramics via a career in graphic arts, textile design and sculpture. During pregnancy, she found working on sculptural forms too heavy and moved across to ceramics. That was the start of her fascination with the medium as it allows her the freedom to explore her enduring passions of form, colour, texture and mark-making.