Annabel was born in Germany and spent several years of her childhood in Egypt before coming to England in 1956. She discovered clay at Farnham Art School at Saturday morning classes in the early 1960s. After leaving school in 1967, she attended Winchester Art School, where she was introduced to conceptual art and concrete poetry, and then Croydon College of Art. She went on to gain a BA(Hons) in Sociology and a PhD in Lesbian History at Essex University, then introduced and taught Lesbian Studies at Birkbeck College for two years. In her early 40s, she returned to her first love of clay, as one of the initial students on the City Lit Ceramics Diploma course in 1989.
Her main body of work involves a process of printing onto both sides of raw clay slabs with coloured slips. The vessels, illustrated with her own photographs and often with maps indicating the source of the photos, are hand-built from the printed slabs, lightly glazed, and fired in an electric kiln to 1240C. More recently she has also used decals, allowing for finer detail of imagery.
Since moving from London to the Sussex coast, her work has shifted in focus from inner cityscape imagery to the riches of the tide line, discarded objects and eroding flotsam. The collaged wall pieces combine stoneware clay with those found remnants or ceramic components made in homage to them.
Annabel is a Selected Member of the Craft Potters Association and has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally. Her work is included in the collections of the Potteries Museum, Stoke-on-Trent, and the Museum of the Home, London.
