Joanna Bird is delighted to present her forthcoming exhibition, Celebrating 30 Years of the Joanna Bird Gallery, which will run from 13th November to 7th December 2024 at the Chiswick gallery.
This expansive exhibition is not only a showcase of exceptional artistry but also a personal tribute to the creative community that has grown around the gallery over the last three decades. Celebrating 30 Years brings together a diverse collection of works to celebrate the gallery’s longstanding relationships with artists including: Richard Batterham, Emmanuel Boos, Norah Braden, Karen Bunting, Michael Cardew, Halima Cassell, Carina Ciscato, Prue Cooper, Steffen Dam, Sara Dodd, Daniel Fisher, Elizabeth Fritsch, Florian Gadsby, Joseph Harrington, Akiko Hirai, Edward Hughes, Chris Keenan, Hyejong Kim, Bernard Leach, David Leach, John Maltby, Sara Moorhouse, Michael O’Brien, Katharine Pleydell-Bouverie, William Plumptre, Lucie Rie, Judith Rowe, Kaja Upelj, Annie Turner, Edmund de Waal, Matthew Warner and Gregory Warren Wilson.
From its first, visionary showing of Clive Bowen’s garden pots delivered in a horse box to 12 years at SOFA in America to the 20th version of COLLECT this year, Celebrating 30 Years will offer a glimpse into the gallery’s evolving journey. Talks and a special breakfast event in conversation with the artists will offer further insight into the breadth of artistic talent that the gallery supports.
The gallery is open 10.00am – 5.00pm, Tuesday to Saturday and by appointment.
We look forward to seeing you!
After National Service, Batterham served a two year apprenticeship under Bernard Leach at the Leach Pottery, St Ives where he met his wife, Dinah Dunn. On their marriage in 1959, he left Leach and established his own studio at Durweston, near Blandford, Dorset. There he built an oil-fired, two chambered kiln, later extending it to three.
In 1967, Richard moved into a new pottery workshop and built a larger four-chambered oil and wood fired kiln. In 1978, with the help of the French potter, Thiébaut Chagué, he also built a small salt glaze kiln. He now has about five firings a year and is producing some of his best work to date. His pots are often regarded as the finest domestic stoneware in the Leach tradition, though he also exemplifies the teaching of Michael Cardew. His pots are made to enrich life, rather than to adorn it, his work is deeply assured and full of authority without being in any way conceited.
Richard’s work is in numerous museums and private collections, and he has been represented by Joanna Bird since 2000. In 2017 he was the subject of a film by the Joanna Bird Foundation titled ‘Richard Batterham, Master Potter’.
Norah Braden is one of the foremost British potters of her time. After graduating with a diploma in painting at the Royal College of Art, she studied at the Leach Pottery from 1925 to 1928, where she became particularly interested in wood ash glazes. She subsequently worked alongside Katharine Pleydell-Bouverie at Coleshill for eight years, using ash glazes made from plants and wood on the estate.
She taught at Brighton and Central Schools of Art. Braden was a perfectionist, and destroyed many of the pots she made, to the extent that her work is now considered rare. She was thought by Leach to have the best eye of any of his pupils and is considered by many to have the greatest sensitivity to shape of any of the Leach pupils.
Emmanuel Boos discovered his craft as an adolescent and later began working in a pottery studio while pursuing academic studies. He then travelled and lived in South Korea and China where he developed an interest in Chinese glazes and porcelain. During his subsequent apprenticeship with Jean Girel, he perfection his knowledge of both ceramic bodies and high-temperature glazes, prompting him to undertake a practice-led PhD at the Royal College of Art.
‘My practice of glaze does not aim mastery nor domination. I do not have those ambitions nor do I wish to turn into a jealous potter as described by Claude Lévi-Strauss. I wish to slip into the glaze and develop a friendly relationship with chaos and eventually trust chance.’
Emmanuel has exhibited internationally, including at Design Basel/Miami, PAD London, and at the Kunsthalle Mannheim. In 2011 he was a Jerwood Makers Open Laureate, and from 2016 to 2019 was artist in residence at the Cité de la Céramique, Sèvres, Paris.
He lives and works between Paris and Mannheim.
Karen began making pots in the early 70s after completing a degree in chemistry at University College London and working as a computer programmer. Discovering ceramics she quickly realised her real vocation. Mainly self-taught, Karen worked briefly for a production potter in Yorkshire, then moved back to London and in 1977, set up her first pottery in Hackney, East London.
Karen made functional pottery, working in reduction fired stoneware. Each piece is first thrown or hand-built, then individually worked and decorated with stripes, spots and cross-hatches which enhance aspects of its form. The reduction firing generates muted colours, often marked out with darker lines of patterning, producing a stillness and sobriety which Karen has expressed as a quality she is drawn to. Quiet and contemplative, her work reveals its qualities to the viewer over time and through use and handling.
Michael Cardew was one of Bernard Leach’s first pupils. In 1926, he set up a traditional English pottery in Winchcombe, Gloucestershire. His aim was to produce functional affordable pieces. He worked from grass roots, mixing his own clay body and all the pigments and glazes.
In 1939, he returned to Cornwall to set up a pottery at Wenford Bridge and in 1942, he established a pottery in Ghana. He trained West African potters and brought his western ideas and technology to the more traditional primitive pottery of West Africa.
Michael Cardew was a pioneer in his field and embraced cross cultural exchanges. He was awarded an MBE and a CBE. His work can be found in all major Public Collections. Joanna Bird was a student of Michael’s for three years in the 1970s.
Born in 1975 in Pakistan, brought up in Lancashire and now living in Shropshire, Halima’s varied, multi-cultural background is tangibly present in her work. A natural creativity presented itself at an early age and was nurtured to fruition as Halima carved her way through an art-based education: an undergraduate degree in 1997 and an MA in 2002.
The culmination of this process is Halima’s precociously mature work. Fusing her Asian roots with a fascination for Mughal and African pattern work and a passion for architectural geometry, Halima’s work is intense yet playful, structured yet creative; substantial yet dynamic and invariably compelling in its originality.
In Halima’s work she combines strong geometric elements with recurrent patterns and architectural principles, her work utilises definite lines and dramatic angles. Halima concentrates on simple forms as the basis of her work in order to maximise the impact of the complex surface patterns in combination with heavily contrasting contours.
Carina Ciscato is a Brazilian potter from Sao Paulo who moved to South London in September 1999, where she worked in the studio of Julian Stair and Edmund de Waal. The move, the contrast in culture and the climate of ceramics, has seen her work grow in confidence and move in exciting new architectural directions.
After graduating from Fundacao Armando Alvares Penteado, Sao Paulo in Industrial Design, she was introduced to Studio Pottery in Krefeld, Germany, where she worked in the studio of Marietta Cremer. On her return to Brazil, she was apprenticed to Lucia Ramenzoni, one of Sao Paulo’s leading ceramic artists.
Carina’s work captures the fluidity of clay as she masterfully alters and re-assembles the thrown forms with a natural sense of balance, form and material. She has been represented by Joanna Bird since 2004 and is in collections including the V&A and the Devonshire collection, as well as in significant private collections internationally.
Prue’s dishes are meant to be used and enjoyed; slip decorated press-moulded earthenware is an approachable and friendly medium. The designs reflect her view of life, celebrating friendship and the sharing of simple pleasures.
Some dishes have inscriptions, which are not separate from the designs but integral to the whole both in form and meaning. The overall design echoes the sense of the words (as a tune echoes the sense of the lyric). The lettering is done freehand, fairly fast.
Prue trained as a painter, and spent twenty years dealing in eighteenth and nineteenth century drawings before deciding to go back to making. After a three year ceramics course she set up her present studio with Regina Heinz, in 1996.
Steffen originally trained as a toolmaker, and worked for some years as such, before realising his curiosity spanned more than that which is measurable. In glass he found these qualities. The uncompromising nature of this material exactly fitted the precise and analytic way of thinking that he was taught in constructing industrial tools.
During his first ten years of glass making, Steffen was practising and experimenting with all the different techniques to become a good craftsman. While doing so, he discovered a new kind of beauty in the fringes of the well-crafted glass he was making. In the area of mistakes and faults – the unwanted air bubbles, ash marks, soot, cracks and crookedness – he found something that could not be predicted or sketched beforehand. He set the established and traditional techniques aside and started making glass all “wrong” in an attempt to capture the good in the bad. Out of these experiments came the “Fossils”, “Plants” and other objects – like frozen extracts of chaos to be watched undisturbed.
Steffen has work in Museums and private collections internationally.
Sara was first drawn to porcelain in 2013 when completing her degree at Cardiff Metropolitan University. Seeing beauty in the fragility and delicacy of the material whilst utilising its strength Sara has used both the elements when developing her signature style.
Using slip she paints to create her wafer thin pieces of ceramic. Then using repetition she creates pieces constructed of these individual units that build up to form sculptures and wall based installations. Eliciting curiosity her work uses general notions of what ceramics is and its possibilities. Sara captures wonder and amazement for the viewer.
Sara describes her mentality while working as a meditative state, allowing her hands to work intuitively.
For Sara the firing itself is an important tool within her process. Porcelain is a high firing material and will reach a temperature of 1260 degrees celsius within the kiln. These high temperatures cause the porcelain to begin to move and shift. Sara then uses this movement to manipulate her designs and add a finishing touch to her free standing pieces. These unique sculptures capture a moment in time from the firing, immortalising the piece. Sara uses this balance of design and chance to capture freedom and individuality in her sculptures.
Her work has been shown internationally including the New York Ceramics and Glass Fair and the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Sara frequently exhibits in London having shown at Collect, held at the Saatchi Gallery in 2017, 2018 and 2019 and at the London Art Fair in 2019.
“My work focuses its attention on sculptural concerns and material qualities. I am interested in form and surface, light and space. I have learnt traditional skills and techniques to explore the potential of ceramic materials. Clay in its sedimentary form is inert and yet, somehow living. I am interested in discovering and revealing properties it has to experience the joy of creating. Play informs my work and is indeed the central pillar to all that I do. My children help me to keep an eye open to this idea and their imaginative play always inspires me.
Clay is like a mirror, it reflects all that is done to it and provides a visual record of process, if one is bold it shows clearly, mistakes cannot be concealed. Therefore skill is essential and has to be acquired through trial and error and then practice. I am very interested in the unity of an object. In the case of a pot this means that the form, the surface, the inside, the rim and the case all have to work together and meant the same thing to one another for the object to be considered a success.”
Elizabeth Fritsch trained as a musician before taking up pottery in 1966. She studied ceramics at the Royal College of Art under Hans Coper. After leaving in 1971, she worked in the Bing and Grondahl factory in Copenhagen where she held her first exhibition. She was a major prize winner in the Royal Copenhagen Jubilee Competition. In 1987, she set up her own studio in London and in that year, was chosen for the Bernard Leach Centenary Post Office Stamp issue with Hans Coper and Lucie Rie.
Her work can be seen in many public collections, including the Belle Rive Museum, Zurich, the Musée Des Arts Decoratifs, Paris, the Shigaraki Museum, Japan, and at the V&A. Joanna Bird curated a solo show for Elizabeth at The Fine Art Society in 2008.
Florian Gadsby is a ceramicist based in London who has been making functional ceramics for the past six years. Making both individual one-off vessels and groups of pots, he complements their simple forms with delicate glazes which have crystalline structures. Having been an apprentice to Lisa Hammond MBE for three years and Ken Matsuzaki in Mashiko, Japan, Florian has learned thoroughly how to throw with efficiency and skill, constantly striving for sensibility and functionality in his work.
Joseph Harrington is a sculptor working predominantly in cast glass. He graduated with an MA in Ceramics and Glass from the Royal College of Art in 2006. He recently won ‘Best in Show’ at the 2017 British Glass Biennale, a gold medal at the Bavarian State Prize 2018 and has recently had his work acquired by the V&A Museum, London Joseph has exhibited both nationally and internationally including a 2013 solo exhibition ‘Landscape Portraits’ at Bullseye gallery, Portland USA and has exhibited at ‘Collect’ art fair at the Saatchi Gallery, London. ‘I interpret landscapes through exploration of material. I focus on rugged coastlines, looking at erosion as a spectacle of discovery and generation of form, revealing a sense of the history and movement of a place. The work is produced using my ‘Lost Ice Process.’ I use salt to sculpt ice as a one-off ephemeral model to take a direct cast from. The textures this provides and the transient nature of the creative process reflects the erosion and sense of time I want to represent in the landscape. There is a roughness from the initial cast that is ground polished and refined to its final finish, revealing the internal structures of the glass and creating facets and flat planes to redefine the essence of the made against the organic surface.’
Akiko Hirai was born in Japan March 1970. She initially studied cognitive psychology in Japan and obtained her degree in Bachelor of letters before coming to England. During her first visit to England to study English language, she was attracted by the English culture and complexity of multi cultural society in London. It made her aware of her own cultural influence in her visual perception. Her interests lead her to her second visit to England in 1999. She met many English potters and learned how to work with clay, soon after that she took a degree course in ceramics at the University of Westminster, then onto graduation from Central St. Martins. Since her graduation Akiko has worked in her studio in London, amongst other varying artists where she now practices her ceramic work.
Akiko makes a variety of wares, drawing from the Japanese tradition of allowing the clay to influence her in how she decorates and fires her work. The interaction between object and viewer enables the viewer to discover the language of her practice in their own way. Her unique approach to ceramics has been highly acclaimed, her work is much in demand internationally.
Having graduated from Bath Academy of Art, Edward studied as a postgraduate student on the Japanese Government Scholarship at Kyoto City Art College from 1977 to 1979. He was awarded the Tomimoto Kenkichi Prize for Domestic Pottery at the college’s graduation exhibition.
Following his studies, Edward established his first pottery studio at Shiga, mounting his first solo exhibition at Osaka in 1979. Exhibitions in Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka became annual events until his return to England in 1984 to set up his studio in Cumbria.
Edward made reduction fired stoneware and porcelain, mostly slip decorated and glazed with locally obtained wood ash glazes. The pottery mark stamped on all of his work incorporates, in addition to his initials, the Japanese characters Earth and Fire, signifying the basic elements of the potter’s craft.
Chris began his career as an actor before being apprentice to Edmund de Waal in 1995 and has worked from his own London studio since 1998. His work – in the form finely potted Limoges porcelain beakers, bowls, bottles and lidded jars – is often glazed using deceptively simple combinations of tenmoku and deep celadon, before being reduction fired in a gas kiln.
Examples of his work can be seen in The Contemporary Art Society, The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool and the MIMA. Joanna Bird has represented Chris since 2000 at shows in London and in SOFA Chicago. He has also exhibited at the British Embassy in St Petersburg, Yufuku Gallery, Tokyo and has been included in the British Council Tours of Scandinavia and Australia.
Hyejeong Kim creates contemporary ceramic art that is both functional and sculptural. Her forms are created in perfect symmetry on the wheel, and then deformed later in her hands. Hyejeong has developed techniques and glazes that are originally derived from Chinese, Korean and Japanese traditional pottery.
Since graduating from Tokyo University of the Arts, Japan, Hyejeong has been exhibiting her work internationally and is currently based in Seoul, Korea.
‘I make pots on a wheel and am deeply fascinated by the dynamism of the movement between the centrifugal and centripetal forces that create a form. There are many different ways to make pots but throwing clay on a wheel yields the most organic shapes, like flowers blossoming or fruit maturing’.
Bernard Leach was born in Hong Kong and grew up in the Far East until the age of 10. He later studied drawing at the Slade School of Art under Professor Henry Tonks, and in 1909 he went to Japan as an etcher. His first experience of working with clay was in Tokyo in 1911 at a Raku party, where he discovered the rapid change in colour of the unfired to the fired glaze. This caught his imagination and inspired his future career. He met Yanagi Soetsu, the philosopher who became a friend the same year.
Through Yanagi Leach became part of the Mingei movement, developing strong beliefs in the human aspects of creating craft, and working only to a very high standard of quality. Bernard expressed these beliefs and principles in print as well as clay, publishing A Potter’s Book in 1940. His long friendship with Shoji Hamada was a very important one; Together, they established the St. Ives Pottery, which became England’s single greatest ceramic institution of the twentieth century.
Bernard Leach was the pre-eminent artist potter of the Studio Pottery Movement. Described as its “father”, in both the West and in Japan, his influence on the Movement and its growth has been profound, and is still palpable. He wrote many books, and his work been exhibited worldwide. His work is in numerous major international collections, public and private.
David Leach (1911 – 2005) was born in Tokyo, Japan and was the son of Bernard Leach. He began to apprentice with his father at the Leach Pottery St. Ives, Cornwall in 1930. In 1955, he set up the Lowerdown Pottery at Bovey Tracey, Devon. David Leach played a crucial part in the survival of his father’s Leach Pottery. After two years training at Stoke-on-Trent, he was responsible for modernizing the St. Ives workshop and setting it up as a production pottery for the stoneware range known as “Standard Ware”. His technical knowledge and commitment were vital to progressing the Studio Pottery tradition.
Leach established his own workshop at Lowerdown in 1956 where he developed a porcelain suitable for studio pottery. He was also involved in many aspects of education.
“I imagine within me a dormant sense of ‘Englishness’ of which I am neither too consciously aware, (nor certainly reluctant to cultivate self-consciously). It is only in retrospect, and my looking at a group of sculptures made specifically for a particular exhibition, that ones preoccupation with subject, and a certain ‘spirit’ which might be called style, and which is inescapable, becomes clear.
Texture is reminiscent of weathered and aged rock and place: a sense of our history. A timeless and seamless link with our past, yet objects which (often with wry humour) are firmly anchored in my immediate present.”
Sara Moorhouse’s work explores the ways in which spaces within landscape appear altered depending on the ever-changing colours of season, weather, time and farming. The bowls act as a canvas for paintings that distill specific landscape scenes, perceptibly altering the size, depth and shape of the form by the applied colour. The forms can be made to seem wider or narrower, deeper or shallower, heavier or lighter, or they may appear to undulate, bend, move or hover by the juxtaposition of finer lines. The viewing of both inner and outer surfaces together enables her to exploit colour connections and visual play from one side to another, emphasising or flattening the dimensionality of the form.
“The research has enabled me to develop a vocabulary of spatial colour knowledge specific to the three-dimensional bowl form, in which I have learnt to manipulate and articulate three-dimensional space to a much greater effect. After a long awaited continuation of my studio practice, I am now integrating the findings from my PhD with colourways and arrangements from my previous practice, for which my intuitive response to landscape scenes, colour and form, remain key objectives for my practice.”
Michael OBrien has spent much of his time in Nigeria continuing the work begun there by Michael Cardew. Originally a painter, he became interested in pottery and travelled to Nigeria in 1963 to study with Cardew, staying with him until 1965. On his teacher’s retirement, O’Brien was employed by the Nigerian government to run the Abuja Pottery, which he did until 1972 when he returned to Cornwall to help Cardew run the Wenford Bridge Pottery (while Cardew went back to Nigeria to make the film “Mud and Water Man”).
Born in Berkshire, Katharine Pleydell-Bouverie grew up in a seventeenth century stately home. In the 1920s, she moved to London and visited Roger Fry at his Omega Workshops; this inspired her to attend the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London where she was a student of Dora Billington.
In 1924 Pleydell-Bouverie was taken on by Bernard Leach at his pottery in St. Ives. She remained at the Leach Pottery for a year and learnt alongside Michael Cardew, Shoji Hamada and Tsuronosuke Matsubayashi. The following year Pleydell-Bouverie started her first pottery with a wood-fired kiln in the grounds of her family estate at Berkshire. She used ash glazes, prepared from wood and vegetables growing on the estate. In 1946 she moved to her second pottery at Kilmington Manor in Wiltshire where she worked until her death in 1985. At Kilmington she used first an oil fired kiln, and then an electric one.
Born in 1959 and following his ceramic design studies at Chelsea College of Art, William Plumptre travelled to Japan and continued his learning with various potters in Japan, most importantly the Japanese National Treasure, Tatsuzo Shimaoka. He returned to England and established his first pottery in 1987. Since 1994, Plumptre has been working from his studio housed in a seventeenth century farmhouse in the Lake District.
Plumptre’s pieces are thrown or press moulded and he often uses rope to create textures in the stoneware clay body, which he then inlays with coloured slip. His glazes are primarily made from local materials including wood ash and granite, and then reduction fired. The strength and beauty of his work lies in the balance of form and colour influenced by the Japanese aesthetic. Instilled in each piece is the dedication of Plumptre’s practice in which he scrupulously oversees every aspect himself.
Born in Vienna, Lucie Rie (née Gomperz) studied ceramics at the Wiener Kunstgewerbeschule under Michael Powolny and Robert Obseiger from 1921 to 1926. She showed her work in various exhibitions concerned with the products of the Wiener Secession, including the Paris exhibitions of 1925 and 1936. She arrived in England in 1938 and established her studio in Albion Mews, West London, where she remained for the rest of her working life.
Her earliest English works were ceramic buttons, brooches and tableware, which she made with the assistance of Hans Coper after the Second World War. However, once wartime exigencies and immediate post-war austerities were over, Rie was free to develop her work, bringing to it an infallible sense of style combined with a certain ‘English’ sense of balance between form and surface.
Even after Hans Coper left to set up his own studio in 1958, they continued to exhibit together and their work, although very different, represented a new departure from the Eastern influences that until then had been the British studio potter’s sole source of reference. Lucie Rie’s work is to be found in numerous major public collections, as well as many private ones.
Working by the sea in Hastings, artist and potter Judith Rowe makes a wide range of earthenware. She uses traditional techniques which she learned under Eddie Hopkins in the renowned Winchcombe Pottery in Gloucestershire.
Judith has established nature as the central motif which permeates her work both metaphorically and literally, since she decorates her cups, jugs and bowls with birds and plants and regularly throws pots with clay that she collects from the shore’s surface at low-tide. Loving nothing more than to be on the beach or in the fields, she decorates her earthenware using oxides and paints that mirror the greens, greys and blues of the sea and surrounding landscape. Judith has cited Minoan terracotta pottery as her biggest inspiration.
Staite Murray was one of the most celebrated, influential, and successful British studio potters in the years before the second world war. He exhibited in fine art galleries with painters and sculptors, and his work commanded high prices for that time. He considered himself to be a fine artist and distanced himself from the folk craft tradition of his potting contemporaries. However, like Bernard Leach he looked to the East, finding aesthetic inspiration in the Oriental ceramic tradition, and spiritual sustenance in Buddhism.
Stylistically, his work is distinctive. He worked in stoneware and earthenware, threw large pots and often left the throwing marks visible as expressive features even though he turned the feet. He built his own gas-fired kiln, and applied rich glazes in stony and mossy greys and browns. His brushwork often consisted of a few abstract strokes which tended to enhance the form. He thought of his pots as inhabiting a space midway between sculpture and painting.
The skill of throwing on a potter’s wheel is the basis of Rupert Spira’s work. Having been the apprentice to some major ceramic artists he sets very high standards in the craft of his art – making things larger and with extraordinary attention to detail than one might anticipate.
The versatility of his skills mean that works vary in scale from miniature to monumental and in decoration from monochrome to intricately hand-written texts. Rupert also painstakingly applies raised texts to some pieces, and in some cases poetry he has written himself.
For Annie Turner, landscape is all important and the Suffolk countryside. More specifically the River Deben, where her family have lived for generations provides an important source of inspiration. It is from the Deben’s banks that Turner has collected fossilised sharks teeth, feathers and general flotsam and jetsam, which she uses in her sculptures to create ‘objects that trigger the memory’.
Her richly layered ‘meander bowls’, impressed with the fragments and detritus she has found on innumerable walks, are small in scale but encapsulate perfectly the broader landscape, while the texture and weather of this water land and the colour of the reflected sky are mirrored in the rich and varied textures of her sculptures.
Annie’s work has been widely exhibited around the world, including Galerie Handwerk in Munich, Galerie Helene Poree in Paris and at the European Triennial for Ceramics and Glass in Belgium. Annie’s work is collected by Museums and collectors internationally.
Joanna Bird has represented her work at COLLECT and SOFA NY since 2004.
Kaja Upelj is a Slovenian artist working between Slovenia and the United Kingdom. She graduated from the Royal College of Art (2018) specializing in glass, prior which she received BA in Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana (2016). During her MA, Upelj developed a technique in which iridescent colours occur from chemical reactions within glass.
Kaja has won numerous scholarships and awards, including being named a Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust Scholar in the UK and one of the global emerging young talents at New Horizons 2018 in China. She has exhibited internationally, showing in art fairs such as Collect in London, Miart and Milan Design Week in Milan, as well as in Nomad Circle situated in various cities.
Edmund received a First Class degree in English Literature at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. In 1992 he took a Post-Graduate Diploma in Japanese language at Sheffield University.
Before going up to Cambridge he was apprenticed to Geoffrey Whiting and after graduating worked in the Cwm Pottery, Herefordshire and a studio in Sheffield. In 1992 he went to Japan to work at the Mejiro Ceramics Studio, Tokyo. On his return in 1993 he set up his workshop in South East London, where he continues to make pottery. He has exhibited extensively and his work is in many major Museums & Collections. Edmund also writes, lectures & has many commitments in the field of British Crafts.
Matthew Warner completed his BA at Camberwell College of Art in 2010. He went on to study under Julian Stair and now works from his studio in South East London. Matthew is inspired by the work of the 18th century potter, Josiah Wedgwood.
‘Pots fascinate me because they embody and articulate so much information about society and culture. They are relics or signals of taste, social behaviour and cultural history. Their forms are incredibly diverse and at the same time carry a universal understanding. These everyday objects span social divides and convey very concentrated messages about their environment. I am particularly interested in the social connotations of these objects throughout history and more specifically how they have been deployed to promote ideas of class, power, and even moral understanding. My new work explores these perceptions of status and how they are influenced by functionality, social environment, material and ideas of luxury.’
Gregory Warren Wilson’s brilliantly colourful and innovative work in glass plays with the translucent nature of the material. Each piece is conceived on multiple layers – sometimes as many as six – and these layers allow light to interact with the glass spatially, penetrating the depths within each frame. The designs he makes sparkle and scintillate, and they appear to move as you look at them.
Warren Wilson’s work is, in part, sculptural. Each piece can only exist in three dimensions, and the glass interacts with the play of light spatially. His work invites the eye to exult in pure colour, and also to investigate the mysterious depths of the space that the designs inhabit within their bespoke frames.
Having lived for many years in Italy and Australia, light is crucial to his work as an artist. The tesserae he uses are hand-cut in Murano, and the irregularity of each unique piece enlivens the surface of his work, refracting light in ways that are eye-catching and unpredictable. Each of his designs is made with great precision so that the individual tesserae reflect and refract light in an extraordinary variety of ways.
Warren Wilson is a prize-winning poet. He has published five collections and was awarded an Arts Council Grant in 2008. A number of his glass designs take as their starting point a fragment of poetry. Over time, his visual response develops into a ‘correlative’, resulting in a glasswork that exists in its own right, while alluding, albeit obliquely, to the original literary source.
We hope that you have enjoyed the virtual exhibition ‘Celebrating 30 Years’. We look forward to seeing those of you who are able to come at the gallery.
We would like to thank all the artists, photographers Alick Cotterill and Sylvain Deleu.
