Click on the links to our past shows below to discover more from our amazing 40 year archive!

Ceramics and Mixed media

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Heather Elvidge

Heather first displayed her ceramics with us a few months ago and we’re delighted to invite her back with a new range of work for this show.  Heather’s work is a reflection of her love for the beauty of the natural world and the stunning Yorkshire countryside.  She also enjoys creating pieces that hopefully will make people smile.  “I discovered my love of clay later than I would have liked but I've always been the creative type.  After attending art school, followed by a degree in Packaging Design, I worked in the toy and gift industry for many years.  A varied career, that even took me to live in Hong Kong before I met my, now, husband and eventually settled back in England in the beautiful countryside of East Yorkshire.”  Heather always felt a little frustration in her career in design always having to work to a brief; “I couldn't fully express my creativity.  I wanted to be free and just make!  Learning to throw a pot was number 1 on my wish list and as soon as I sat at the wheel, with the clay silkily spinning between my fingers, I was hooked!  A few years later and ceramics is now my full time business.”  Heather feels extremely lucky and happy to be able to spend so much of her time doing something that she loves so much.  To Heather, the entire process, from sticky lump of clay to beautiful piece of finished ceramic is thrilling, challenging and utterly addictive.

 

Jean White

Jean first exhibited with us back in 2019 in a show we called Tweet.  She is a designer-maker working in ceramics and has recently completed an MA in Design Craft at Manchester Metropolitan University.  Prior to this she worked as a professional illustrator.  “I now use my illustration skills to carve and model my drawings into clay.  From these carvings I create my own plaster moulds and slip cast each piece in either porcelain or parian clay from the moulds.”  Jean works to raise awareness of the conservation status of red-list British bird species, species which are threatened.  “As a keen birdwatcher I have seen the decline in bird numbers first-hand, since I was a child in the 1960s.”  Jean references the traditional processes employed in Wedgwood’s Jasperware, combining sprigged work with clean contemporary shapes.  Her images rely on the visual similarity of fossils to the low relief of ceramics sprigs, creating a metaphor for the threat to our native birds’ existence.

 

Poppy Davis: CloD Studio

Poppy makes her first appearance at the gallery in this exhibition and we're delighted to have her on board with her beautiful ceramics.  Poppy, the maker behind CloD, is a ceramicist based in Leeds, with a studio at Sunny Bank Mills.  She makes wheel thrown homeware in stoneware clay, with an emphasis on colour, line and pattern.  She takes inspiration from many different things, particularly flowers and plants, decorating her pots with loose, painterly brushstrokes.  She enjoys making functional pottery that is colourful and exciting. 

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Julie Barham

This is the first time we’ll be working with Julie which we’re very excited about.  Julie is a ceramicist and produces both tableware and sculptural pieces for the garden.  "What I love about pottery is the variety that it offers the maker with regard to type and colour of clay, the many different making techniques and also the range of colours, stains, tools and glazes for decoration."  Julie works with stoneware and white earthenware, using both hand building techniques and throwing on the wheel.  She enjoys experimenting with different stoneware glazes and decorating with coloured slips.  "I see the pot as a canvas for my designs, and I love the contrast between the bare clay and the coloured slips and glossy glaze.  I like the idea that a pot can be both beautiful to look at, but also functional."  Julie's inspiration comes from the natural world, from plants and the landscape.  She is particularly interested in seedpods, and in the patterns that can be seen in nature and in architecture, whether this is a beautiful cathedral or an ultra-modern building.  Julie also loves the bold and bright colours and designs of textiles, particularly those of the 50s and 60s. 

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Anna Lambert

Anna’s last show with us was in 2017 when she was invited to have a Solo Ceramic Showcase here in Leeds.  She has a strong following of collectors and her ceramics are highly sought after.  She makes hand-built earthenware ceramics using various techniques including slab-building, modelling and painted slips.  Anna‘s ideas reflect an interest in her locality exploring narratives relating to, amongst other things, climate change in her local landscape and the regeneration of orchards.  Inspired by new nature writing, she engages with a common language beyond pastoral sentimentality, combining drawing with the abstract qualities of pots, their spaces, edges and surfaces.  Using a variety of techniques, each of her pieces are entirely unique.  Each piece is developed during the making stage using drawing in the landscape as a starting point.  Often assembling her pieces from fine pliable sheets (slabs) of clay – white earthenware mixed with a rougher clay – she then alters, cuts and fettles them.  On occasion she may add sections of texture from carved or lino cut designs.  When the form is finished, pieces are painted with multiple layers of coloured slips, often with darker underpainting, which may then be cut back to reveal the embossed pattern or drawn on with sgraffitto.  Further layers may be added with the use of hand cut tissue paper stencils and masks.  

 

David Ashby

David last exhibited with us in our Northern Lights exhibition in 2011 which highlighted some of our talented Yorkshire makers.  David's ceramics are influenced by textured abstract painting and collage, from artists such as Antoni Tapies, Robert Rauschenberg and Jean-Michel Basquait.  David's current range of Contemporary hand thrown functional ceramics inspired by abstract painting and collage, include mugs, jugs, vases, lidded pots and bowls of various sizes.  The work is hand thrown and slip decorated with a mixture of wax resist, inlaid colours and scraffito decoration.

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Lucy Burley

Lucy started exhibiting with us earlier last year and we're thrilled to include her beautiful ceramics as part of this show.  She studied Ceramics at Wimbledon and Camberwell Art Schools, graduating with a BA Hons in 1996.  Her work is both decorative and functional; simple shapes which make sculptural groups. “I’m inspired by Giorgio Morandi’s still-life paintings and want my work to have the same harmony of form and colour.”  Lucy’s vessels are thrown on the wheel using white earthenware clay; “I developed a semi-matt earthenware glaze, smooth to the touch, to which I add oxides and stains to obtain a wide spectrum of colours.”

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Fiona Thompson

Fiona first worked with us back in 2005 when she had her first Solo Ceramic Showcase here with us.  We welcomed her back in 2013 for a show called Birds of a Feather.  For this exhibition Fiona will be showcasing her most recent collection from her Contained Flora project.  The forms from this project are uncomplicated and allow the surface to develop and show to its maximum.  They are intended to be very familiar, domestic in reference, and build on the history of the vessel as narrative.  The vessels are hand built, and have multiple surface layers built up through painting, low-tech printing, glazes and decals.  This project began with the subject of formal and botanic gardens, an interest in the structuring and ordering of nature and collecting and classifying the organic.  “As lockdown restrictions came into place early on in the project, the photographs, sketches and notes gathered in early 2020 in the Royal Botanic Gardens took on more significance as a snapshot of those moments, pinning down specific visits and seasons.  I also began to draw my own house plants during prolonged stays at home, focusing on this almost miniature world away from the outside.  The repetition of drawing became important, as a way to move the project forward and as a way to distract from the bigger issues.  Ironically the original interest was in how we try to contain and control the organic, and yet we became the ones contained whilst the gardens continued to grow.  Most of my drawings concentrated on the closeup of leaves, rather than as I originally anticipated of the wider garden space, and often those fallen and layered on the ground.”

 

Becky Crawford

Becky first displayed with us back in 2018 in our general display section of the gallery.  We are thrilled to be showcasing Becky's new collection for this exhibition.  Becky lives in South Devon where her favourite things to do are swim in the sea, smell flowers and imagine being small and getting down to looking at tiny beetles, ants and caterpillars.  She makes mixed media artworks mostly in wire combined with recycled plastic which she often finds on her local beaches, along with painted paper elements.  “Colour is very important to me and my husband tells me when he first invited me to his white flat with white furnishings, that I memorably asked him “what do you do for colour?” as I see colour as essential to life as vitamins and minerals in your diet.”  Becky’s ideas start with a story told to her daughter, a scene from real life, a memory or an imagined moment.  Nature and the natural world is very important to her and her work reflects this passion; “my intention is to bring a smile to people’s faces when they look at my work.  Life can be so serious and I hope my pieces remind you to enjoy the small things like climbing trees, flying kites, getting down into long grass to look at the beautiful shapes of grasses, leaves and flowers or imagining flying up to the stars.”

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Virginia Graham

Virginia last exhibited with us in 2017 in a show we called Made with Love.  Based in the small Wiltshire town of Corsham, Virginia works from her studio at the bottom of the garden.  Virginia's ceramics are an eclectic amalgamation of nostalgic form and imagery, transforming the ordinary past by drawing on a wide range of domestic traditions.  Her handmade pieces include teapots and cups, coaster tiles and milk jugs.  Virginia uses a combination of slip casting and hand building techniques to create pieces in her signature style.  Their surface decoration includes slip painting, enamel transfer printing and metallic lustre's, making reference to historical wares including the familiar blue and white stripes of Cornish Ware as well as industrial plumbing and Victorian fabrics.  The resulting pieces are eclectic and precious with a playful humour yet at the same time are ordinary and familiar reminding us of that bygone era when afternoon tea was a serious business.

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Gillies Jones

This talented duo have exhibited with the gallery in our Without Colour exhibition back in 2009 and one of our Christmas shows called Glass in the Window in 2010.  Partners in life and in art, Stephen Gillies and Kate Jones have been creating exceptional blown glass together for over 20 years.   Their stunning free blown, engraved vessels convey a unique aesthetic, drawing inspiration from the beauty of their rural surroundings.  Concerning itself with the landscape, their work blurs the boundaries between abstraction and literal interpretation.  Deliberately distorted bowl forms represent the hollows of the Yorkshire Dales and Moor tops; the gentle distortion of each vessel creating a unique form.  “Light illuminates the landscape around us and light animates our glass.  We explore the play of light within each piece through the use of Swedish overlay.  We slowly and meticulously carve into the fine coloured layers and surfaces of our vessel forms.”

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Kate Kelly: Kaper Kate

This is the first time we have had the pleasure of working with Kate.  She creates a menagerie of playful paper sculptures.  Birds, flowers and small mammals are her favourite subjects and each piece is a one of a kind bespoke piece of contemporary craft.  Each free standing or wall hung sculpture is made from hand printed papers and varnished with a UV protective lacquer.  Every part of the making process is done by hand, transforming sketches into unique sculptures; “I begin with doodles in lots of sketch books, before working out a template for a three dimensional design. This is my favourite part: working out the maths, armed with sellotape and a protractor."  Kate enjoys working with paper as it is ordinary and unassuming; we have all made a paper boat or an aeroplane.  There are also so many options for creating work with very little environmental impact. “My designs begin as a doodle in a sketchbook and it pleases me that the same material is used for the finished piece.  I use a few recycled papers for my sculptures, all chosen for their strength, lovely textures and environmental impact.”  Animals have also been an important part of Kate’s life; “I am a bit of an introvert and find cats much easier to talk to than humans! It might be that my affinity for animals is in the genes.  My Grandad was the zookeeper at Belle Vue Zoo in Manchester. As a child, I was obsessed with the peregrine falcon and have always been fascinated with birds.  Two years ago I took on two Senegals from Birdline, a charity for abandoned and mistreated parrots.  But by in large animals belong in the wild and so I create sculptures in an attempt to capture their beauty. We can’t keep a barn owl in the living room, so I make paper versions to spread a little joy of them instead. Being in nature is good for the soul and I hope to convey the happiness it evokes in me in my work.”  

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