Autumn Exhibition
2024
Our Autumn 2024 Exhibition features artists from across the United Kingdom, delivering Ceramics, baskets and ceramic sculpture.
Contact us directly if you would like to find out more about our artists featured below or purchase one of their pieces.
Gwladys Evans
Gwladys was first introduced to ceramics at an evening classes at Aberystwyth Art Centre. From those days onwards it has been her dream and ambition to create work in clay. Gwladys’ inquisitive nature helps her to explore the possibilities and boundaries of the medium, and she feels she has only just touched upon it and is at the beginning of her pottery adventure.
Gwladys is inspired and enthused by, animals and being in nature, also, poems and folk stories interest her. She hand builds unique sculptures and decorative pots creating original work using stoneware and porcelain. In this collection her aim is to use sculpture to evoke a sense of appreciation, a warm familiarity, to make the viewer appreciate the strength and beauty of the animal.
Jenny Gracie
Jenny first discovered willow growing in the garden of her new home in Devon 20 years ago and has been cultivating both her willow bed and knowledge of its uses ever since.
Combining a degree in Integrated craft with professional basketry training has allowed her to celebrate the historical and traditional elements of basket making whilst exploring contemporary interpretations of basketry in her work.
Basket making has a long and fascinating history across cultures, meaning Jenny is never short of inspiration. To add to that, the textures, and colours of the natural materials she uses offer endless opportunities to experiment and complement the willow with other materials such as bark, soft fibres, ceramics, and textiles.
Jenny describes basketmaking today as an opportunity to connect with these time-honoured craft skills and allow them to remind us of a sustainable and beautiful way of working seasonally with natural and native materials.
In addition to making work for exhibitions, shops, and individuals, Jenny teaches basketry skills. In sharing these skills, she aims to preserve the craft and continue to create valued spaces where people can experience the joy of making by hand.
Mark Griffiths
Mark was born in 1956 in South Shropshire. An inspirational art teacher, a contemporary of Mick Casson who had trained with Mick at Harrow, encouraged him to take up pottery and a lifelong passion began. Mark got his first job working as a thrower for Colin Carr, a slab builder in Derbyshire.
Next Mark worked for sculptor Fritz Stellar at the Square One Design Workshop, near Stratford-on-Avon. Fritz was a charismatic entrepreneur. When Mark wasn’t throwing pots he worked on huge ceramic murals for the emerging new town centres. But it was the time spent with Russell Collins, one of the finest teachers and throwers and the most patient man Mark knows, that gave him the confidence to set up his first workshop in 1975 with the help of a New Craftsman’s Grant of £1600 from the CAC.
From there Mark moved to West Wales but it was the 1980s and tastes had changed again. Stoneware domestic pots were hard to sell and Mark made thousands of terracotta bird feeders and parsley pots for mail order firms which paid the mortgage and helped him move back to South Shropshire. There Mark rebuilt his workshop in a redundant village school where he continues to work today. He made terracotta garden pots for many years, undertaking big commissions for the National Trust and other estates until the physical toll of working on such a scale forced a return to high fired stoneware about twelve years ago. So Mark has come full circle, back to where he started forty years ago.