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.
With a BA (Hons) degree in Fine Art, an MA in Communication Design, and following a career in design and academia, Amanda-Sue first came to ceramics by enrolling on a course at Morley College, London in 2012. With further short courses and by joining a communal ceramics studio Amanda-Sue continued to develop her practice, making the step change to becoming a full-time ceramics-artist in 2018. In 2020, Amanda-Sue co-founded Grove Vale Ceramics, a gallery and studio in East Dulwich, London.
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.
Claire creates decorative smoke-fired pots. She chooses to use porcelain due to its strong resistance to wild temperature changes during the smoke-firing process. Her pots are not functional nor suitable for holding water due to the porous quality of the unglazed burnished clay which is necessary for smoke-firing.
Graham’s interest in ceramics began at York School of Art in the 1960s and continued at Cardiff College of Art, graduating from there in 1971. He later worked at both colleges as a ceramics technician and having retired in 2009, Graham established a workshop in Gloucestershire.
David read philosophy and literature at Warwick University. Realising the lack of jobs as a philosopher, he became a potter and taught part-time in the ceramics department at Wolverhampton University for thirty years. This allowed him the space in which to continue with his personal practice. He was awarded a PhD from Manchester Metropolitan University in 2016. David used the inquiry within his thesis to examine the question of how he could employ the language of materiality, making, and firing (particularly raku) to critically focus on issues of personal identity.
Gaby’s current focus is making saggar-fired, wheel-thrown pots. What originally drew her to this type of making was the interplay between the highly controlled form, and smooth, polished, surface texture of the piece on the one hand; and the ‘seemingly’ random nature of the surface marks created by smoke and metallic, chemical reactions, on the other.
