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.
Doug works in red earthenware clay, the pots simply decorated, with appliqué decoration or sgraffito, using a basic palette of traditional slips that are made from natural raw materials. The majority of his pots are thrown on the wheel with some press moulded dishes, decorated with freely trailed lines.
After a long and varied career in design and printing, Judy followed her passion for ceramics. At the age of sixty, she enrolled in a 3D Craft and Design BA at a local college, graduating with First Class Honours, and went on to complete an MA at the Royal College of Art, specialising in Nerikomi and Kintsugi. While at the RCA, she was invited to exhibit in China and was commissioned by ROSL to create a presentation plaque for a prize-winning musician.
For this new exhibition, Jane will be showing a group of hemispherical double walled bowls mixed with different organic and man-made materials collected randomly, each a metaphor for memory and words. Using combinations of press moulding, coiling and slabbing processes before burnishing the surface, her pieces are then low fired and then refined with sandpaper followed by a higher temperature firing.
Ian was born in Birmingham - a city famous in its past for guns, cars, motorbikes and jewellery: a city of makers. He studied ceramics at the Central School of Art, London. His teachers included Gordon Baldwin and Dan Arbeid who encouraged skills and making of all types, from hand-building to industrial techniques as possible means of artistic expression. Ian’s own teaching and exhibiting in the UK, Europe and the Far East has provided opportunities to produce work as a response to different places and cultures.
Shirley has been making things for as long as she can remember. With a background in textiles and a degree in Surface Decoration from Leicester Polytechnic, her early fascination with ceramics began while visiting the ceramics department, which felt to her like an alchemist’s world. Years later, during a period of personal change, she joined an evening hand-building course and was immediately drawn to clay. What began as a source of calm and focus has since developed into an intuitive, largely self-taught practice.
Jane’s work is about finding beauty in the ordinary. It’s about the small things and recognising the accidental poetry in the unnoticed and overlooked. Living in the city, this is often found in apparently insignificant details of the built environment - the way a surface has weathered, the juxtaposition of materials, the sculptural qualities of found forms.
