Championing the very best independent ceramic makers for over 60 years

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.

 

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Meet Our Makers

All of our makers are members of the Craft Potters Association and each of them have a story to tell.

Chris Barnes

Chris was born in 1959. His introduction to clay began at adult education classes in Islington. He went on to study Sculpture at St. Martins School of Art, London and graduated in 1982. Chris has moved around the country over the last decades. He helped set up the Chocolate Factory studios in Hackney, London in 1995. In 2006, he moved to Argyll, Scotland to set up another pottery. By 2009, Chris relocated to Cumbria setting up a new pottery in a converted farm building.

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David Allnatt

David was born in South London and trained in Graphics and 3D design. After working in art education for many years, specialising in ceramics, he took early retirement to concentrate on his own work and established his own workshop in the Forest of Dean where he now produces a range of hand-built ceramics.

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Matthew Blakely

Matthew’s work explores the links between ceramics and geology and place, making pieces entirely from geological samples that he has collected from specific locations around the country, and that illustrate the ceramic qualities inherent in these materials.

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Francis Lloyd-Jones

All Francis' work is thrown using stoneware clays and is reduction fired, increasingly turning to salt glaze for his desired surface. Functional pots are his main concern, pots made for use in daily life, often giving a nod towards other historical objects, not necessarily made of clay, featuring utilitarian components now ultimately defunct but repurposed as decoration. He uses a muted palette of glazes and seeks a balance between looseness and definition in his forms.

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Ashraf Hanna

Award-winning artist, Ashraf works with the vessel to explore relations between profile, line, and space. Using a process of hand-building, and working with colour and texture, he examines the juxtaposition of sharp lines and soft curves.

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James Oughtibridge

Being brought up close to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park has been a gift and an education to James from a very young age. The aesthetic of Barbara Hepworth’s work is almost ingrained in him, as though it were the basis of his consciousness of texture, proportion, line and form. After completing a foundation course at Dewsbury Art College, James spent two weeks in the ceramics department working with renowned Raku Ceramist David Roberts. He was immediately drawn to clay as a material. Later, upon graduation from Loughborough and then the Royal College of Art in 2001, James set up a studio in London for several years before returning to his native Yorkshire in 2005.

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