Collect 2024

AMY HUGHES

b. 1985, Dewsbury, UK.

“Amy Jayne Hughes reinterprets historical vase designs while nodding at the original aesthetic yet leaving space for the clay.

“Hughes’ vases resemble pixelated images of historic vases; they are sketched from the old but resemble nothing of the past - they occupy a place entirely of their own. Hughes’ blind contour drawing technique captures the object's essence while acknowledging the clay material and her role in the reinterpretation: Fingerprints left in the clay and drawn upon cardboard-like pieces stuck to the vase trace Hughes’ artistic process. The play is consciously left visible.

“Hughes’ work is both a celebration of our ceramic past and reclaiming space for clay.” - Jesper Nøddeskov, Homo Faber Guide.

Amy Jayne Hughes is a Ceramicist, a clay purist and enthusiast. She adores working with her medium and the possibilities that it allows. Primarily a hand builder in her practice, Hughes enjoys combining traditional making techniques and exploring form and decoration and establishing dialogues between the two. Working with an awareness of clay, she feels it is important to leave traces of material identity on a piece to celebrate the uniqueness of it and the wonderfully idiosyncratic ways in which it behaves, highlighting and drawing attention to rather than covering over. This allows for brushstrokes and dribbles of slip, raw cut and torn edges, exposed joints and considered application of glaze.

Taking inspiration from historically significant ceramic objects and collections, Hughes strives to reference the originals whilst reinterpreting and reinventing, to make them more accessible and breathe a fresh life into them. Working with a cultural awareness, Hughes seeks to take such pieces to new audiences and find a place in contemporary culture for them. Sources for her recent ceramic explorations include Grecian, Islamic and 18th century French Porcelain.

Hughes loves to draw and her collections often involve exploring different methods of interpreting her drawings into clay. Most recently, taking a collage-like approach, Hughes uses enlarged elements of her sketches, tracing them directly onto her clay surfaces in decorating slip and attaching them onto her coil and slab-built forms, creating exciting patterns and shapes and working with a colourful and lively painterly approach. The making process informs the composition, not knowing how the final piece may look.

Amy Jayne Hughes studied MA Ceramics & Glass at Royal College of Art, London, 2008-2010 and BA Ceramics at Loughborough University, 2004-2007. She also won the City and Guilds Life Drawing Award.

Notable solo exhibitions include: ‘Garniture’ Croome Court, Worcester, Arts Council England funded (2018), and ‘Vase & Cover’ Room 141, V&A Museum, London Design Festival (2018). Hughes’ notable group exhibitions include: Art Miami, Cynthia Corbett Gallery (2022-23), COLLECT, Cynthia Corbett Gallery, Somerset House (2021-23), British Art Fair, Cynthia Corbett Gallery (2022-23), London Art Fair, Cynthia Corbett Gallery (2022), ‘Piranesi 300: A Visionary Revisited’ Dublin Castle & the Casino at Marino, Dublin (2022), ‘Leach 100’ The Leach Pottery, St Ives (2022), ‘Artefact’, Vessel Gallery (2021), ‘Out Of the Blue’ 50 Years of Designers Guild, The Fashion and Textile Museum, London (2020), COLLECT, Vessel Gallery (2019), ‘Renewed Past’ CODA Museum, Netherlands (2016), ‘AWARD’, British Ceramics Biennial (2015), and 'SWEET 18’, Castle of Hingene, Belgium (2015).

Hughes has been nominated for many prestigious awards and prizes. She was a shortlisted Artist for the Brookfield Properties Craft Award (2023); nominated for the Perrier-Jouët Arts Salon Prize by Barney Hare Duke (2016); shortlisted for the Young Masters Maylis Grand Ceramics Prize, (2014); shortlisted for the Constance Fairness Foundation Award, December (2011); awarded the Anglo-Swedish Scholarship Bursary (2010); and selected to represent the UK in ‘New Talent’ at the European Ceramic Context, Denmark (2014). Hughes was also winner of Best Community Public Art 2013 project with Pump House Gallery for ‘Imaginariums’

Hughes has undertaken residencies in the UK and Internationally including: V&A Ceramics & Industry Artist in Residence in collaboration with 1882Ltd (April – September 2015); Siobhan Davies Dance Studio with Manifold Studio, (July – September 2013); Anglo-Swedish Scholarship Exchange, Konstfack School, Stockholm (January – April 2011)

Hughes’ work has been featured in Ceramic Review, ‘A Modern Decadence’, CR 309, Annie La Santo (2021); ‘Encore! The New Artisans’, Olivier Dupon, Thames & Hudson, (2015); ‘Collectives: The Model for Success’, Edith Garcia, Ceramics Monthly, (2020); ‘Studio Ceramics’, Alun Graves (2023); ‘Getting to know Amy Hughes’, India Miller, FAIRE Magazine (2023). Hughes was recently included in the Homo Faber Guide of Artisans and Master Craftsmen, curated by The Michelangelo Foundation (2023).

Hughes’ work has been acquired internationally. Collections include: Hendelsbanken, Sweden (2011), ‘Tryst’, V&A permanent collection (2016), and Private Collections in USA, UK, France, Sweden, and Netherlands.

Amy Hughes was a finalist for the Young Masters Maylis Grand Ceramics Prize in 2014 and is internationally represented by the Cythia Corbett Gallery. She was highly commended for the Brookfield Properties Craft Award 2023.

JESS RIVA COOPER

b. 1981, Toronto, Canada

Jess Riva Cooper is a Toronto-based artist and educator, integrating colour, drawing, clay and numerous other materials to create sculptures and installation-based artworks. Her pieces often explore themes of mythology, nature, and transformation, blending human and botanical imagery in ways that evoke vulnerability and resilience. Working in an invasive, parasitic way, Riva Cooper uses scavenged and broken remnants of her older sculptures to create a finished result that captures a static moment of tension, struggle, and the reclamation process that often intersects nature, objects, and human. Nature overgrows her ceramic busts, subverting order, inviting chaos and becoming a parable for a transient alternative state instead of a representation of life.

Cooper holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) and a Master of Fine Arts in Ceramics from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Her artistic practice is shaped by residencies at Medalta, The Archie Bray Foundation, and the Kohler Arts/Industry Program, among others. Her work has been exhibited widely across North America and internationally, including at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto and the Cynthia Corbett Gallery in London. Through her sculptures, Cooper addresses ecological concerns and cultural storytelling, encouraging reflection on the interconnectedness of life, decay, and renewal. Without intervention, nature takes over and breathes new life into objects and sculptures. As humans pressure the planet, what happens when the environment pushes back? When decay precipitates regrowth in new and unexpected spaces? Will we, responsible for the climate crisis, unintentionally create a hybridization of flora and fauna as imagined in my sculptures?

Notable recent exhibitions and awards include:

Pullulate: Solo Exhibition, Harbourfront Centre, Toronto, ON - 2024

Young Masters Maylis Grand Ceramic Prize, Cynthia Corbett Gallery, London, UK – 2023

ANNE-LAURE CANO

b. 1979, France

“Cano’s work is direct and confrontational. Upon first sight, the jagged forms and conglomerate colours of the Ussade Series are challenging to interpret. Closer inspection reveals how each piece is constructed by a patchwork of beautifully glazed landscapes, a strikingly unique sense of colour, and an impressive ability to resolve materials into counterpoint whilst resisting the facile and the cloying. Cano harnesses vocabularies of architecture and sculpture in the service of robust, innovative, and emotionally intelligent ceramic works.” – Ashley Thorpe, author of Contemporary British Ceramics: Beneath the Surface and Contemporary British Studio Pottery: Forms of Expression.

Anne-Laure Cano’s practice is led by material, process and meaning. She examines the properties of clay through a process of breaking and reassembling her own pieces; twisting, pulling and mixing various clays together with eclectic components. Cano’s work explores how ceramics can echo the human condition, how we respond to the passing of time, memories and sense of belonging.

In her recent work, Cano explores themes of limitations and adaptation. Loosely inspired by her experience as a foreigner, this new series explores moments of transition - how we adapt to new situations and constantly reinvent ourselves. Cano reuses old pieces in new work, creating a constant movement of destruction and regeneration. This lifecycle reflects on identity, transformation, and finding a new balance. The lines of stress, cracks and distortion of the pieces result from pushing the material to its limits, as well as the unanticipated results from firings. This illustrates humanity’s duality between fragility and resilience.

Anne-Laure Cano was born in France and studied ceramics in London where she graduated from City Lit College. Before studying ceramics, she gained an MA in Cultural Studies at Michel de Montaigne University, Bordeaux – France. She recently moved to Barcelona.

Cano was announced as the Overall Winner of the Young Masters Maylis Grand Ceramics Prize 2023 in London where her work was exhibited at Gallery 67 in Marylebone. She has also shown her work at COLLECT in 2023 at Somerset House in London where she was shortlisted for the acclaimed Brookfield Art Properties Craft Award. That year she was also selected to show her work at the Design Museum in Barcelona as part of the Best Design of the Year exhibition.

In 2021 Cano won the CERCO International Ceramics biennale award in Zaragoza, Spain leading to her first solo show in 2022: Ussade-The longing to Belong at the Asociación de Artesanos de Aragón as part of the International Ceramics Fair in Zaragoza. That same year she won the Pujol and Bausis Ceramics Prize at the Angelina Alos International Ceramics biennale in Esplugues de Llobregat, Barcelona.

In December 2020 she took on an art residency at the Porthmeor Studios in Saint Ives, UK with the collective of artists Eutectic as part of the Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada pottery centenary celebrations.

Cano’s work has featured in publications including; The Gloopy, the Bulky and the Ugly - and you thought ceramics were delicate’, Victoria Woodcock, Financial Times (2023); ‘Anne-Laure Cano: Ussade’, essay by Ashley Thorpe, Ceramics Now (2022); ‘One Year In’, Paul Bailey, Emerging Potters Magazine (2019).

Cano’s work is held in institutional collections including: Asociación de Artesanos de Aragón-Permanent collection-Zaragoza-Spain, Can Tinturé Ceramics Museum – Permanent collection – Barcelona – Spain, and private collections worldwide.

In 2023 Cano began a collaboration with the Rajoletta Museum, a former ceramics factory in Barcelona to create a new body of work in response to their archive and collection. This will result in a two-person exhibition alongside artist Jim Gladwin that will open at the end of 2024.

Anne-Laure Cano was the winner of the Young Masters Maylis Grand Ceramics Prize 2023.

SAERI SEO

b. 1992, Korea

The ‘Moon Jar’ is a representative Korean traditional pottery of the Joseon Dynasty that has contributed the elevated reputation of Korean ceramics worldwide. Historically, the moon jar was associated only with male roles, as women were not allowed to produce or access the studio due to the belief that they brought bad luck. To overcome a childhood and adolescence coloured by this belief (and accompanying abuse), SaeRi began destroying her works to reveal her trauma, incorporating shapes from Korean representative ceramics as her cultural background influenced her mental struggles. By detonating the beautiful pottery, she stepped forward and started communicating with the world.

SaeRi Seo studied ceramics for her BA at Seoul Women’s University, and lwent on to complete a Masters in Ceramics and Makers at Cardiff Metropolitan University in 2022. Recent exhibitions and awards include: NAE Open 2023, New Art Exchange (2023), RBA Rising Stars Exhibition, The Royal Over-Seas League (2023), and nominated as a finalist for the BADA Art Award (2022).

SaeRi Seo was the winner of the Young Masters Emerging Woman Artist Award in 2023.

EBONY RUSSELL

b. Australia

Ebony Russell is an Australian ceramic artist who uses an unorthodox approach to construct ceramic sculptures. Her unique technique was developed out of an interest in gendered aesthetics, labour and traditional craft practices where Russell methodically pipes porcelain in series of intricate layers to build gravity- defying forms. Challenging the traditional making processes of decorative vessels; in her works the decoration becomes the structure, and the boundaries between the two are erased. Exploring established perceptions of cultural and artistic practices that were once exclusively coded as feminine and thus insignificant, Russell’s work celebrates the decorative, promiscuous aesthetics and politics of purity; the superficial, excess and delight – with pleasure.

Russell completed a Bachelor of Applied Arts (Honours) at Monash University in 2003 and in 2019 graduated from The National Art School Sydney with a Masters of Fine Art. Russell has won many awards including the Franz International Rising Star Award in 2018 and the Meroogal Women’s Art Prize in 2023. Major exhibitions include ‘Think Pinker’, Gavlak Gallery Los Angeles (2023), ‘SABOTAJE ESTEìTICO’, Yusto Giner Gallery, Spain (2022), ‘Halcyon Days’, Modern Eden Gallery, San Francisco (2022), ‘Clay Dynasty’, The Powerhouse Museum (2022), ‘Interconnected’, NERAM (2022).

Read the Art Mama feature here.

Ebony Russell was Highly Commended for the Young Masters Maylis Grand Ceramics Prize 2023.

JEMMA GOWLAND

b. UK

Jemma Gowland’s work explores the way that girls are constrained from birth to conform to an appearance and code of behaviour, to present a perfect face, and maintain the expectations of others. The use of porcelain, or of stoneware with layered disrupted surfaces, denote value yet describe the vulnerability beneath. Her most recent work draws on the traditional history of the figurine, from Meissen to the present; echoing the white unglazed finish with gold lustre. Current themes build on this tradition, with it’s symbolism of the female figure as ornament and object, to highlight issues of growing up female in the modern world.

Jemma Gowland trained for a BSc in Engineering Product Design, working in industrial design and architectural model making before becoming a teacher of Design and Technology, a career she followed for many years. Ceramics became first a hobby, and then a full-time occupation after leaving teaching in 2014. Her deepening interest in the immense possibilities of ceramics as a material led to further study, culminating in the City Lit Ceramics Diploma, London, graduating in 2019. Awards and exhibitions include: Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (2023), Royal Cambrian Academy of Art Open Exhibition (2023), Collect Open (2022), Bevere Graduate Award (2019-20), and Potclays student award, Art in Clay (2019).

Jemma Gowland was Highly Commended for the Young Masters Emerging Woman Artist Award in 2023.

VALERIE BERNARDINI

b. 1968, France

Valerie Bernardini works with photography, ceramics and glass. Some of her works are photographs, others are ceramics, glass or a combination of both. Whichever the medium, she works directly with light as if she were sculpting it around her ceramic and glass pieces. She highlights the beauty of the ephemeral material by arresting the movement at a specific moment (her pieces are organic-like shapes) and by emphasising the textures and translucency with shadows and depth. The photography and the sculpture piece interact in a game of scale, angle and intimacy. Trying to express sensory feelings within photography or sculpture requires constant experimentation.

Valerie Bernardini studied HND Ceramics at Morley College London. She is now completed her degree in MA in Ceramic & Glass at the Royal College of Art, London. Bernardini has been shortlisted in the New Designer for the Belmond Award in 2021 and then selected for the 2021 Fresh British Ceramics Biennal. She has also been awarded "commended" in the 'New Graduate Review' in 2022.

Valerie Bernardini was shortlisted for the Young Masters Invitational Exhibition 2022.

MARGO SELBY

b. 1977, Eastbourne, UK

Selby is an artist and designer working with colour and geometric form in textiles. She makes handwoven artworks, and oversees the design work of the Margo Selby Studio for mill production and commercial textiles applications – her tenet being ‘Art Into Industry’ – an approach to making art that is akin to that of the ‘Old Masters’ and mistresses, with their expanded studios and public commissions.

Selby uses thread to create abstract geometric artworks that explore repetition and transition, symmetry and asymmetry, the dynamic and the stable. She is interested in the relationship between the body and the machine, hand and industry, craft and technology. The loom, and the disciplined nature of weaving as a practice, provides boundaries and constraints which can be tested. The orderly nature of the craft of weaving is reflected in the developing designs of the artworks. She is satisfied by rhythmic and uniform repetition – where each element of a composition is changed in a methodical progression.

Studied at Chelsea College of Art & Design and the Royal College of Art in London, with a term at Atelier National d’Art in Paris. She now teaches in various institutions, and has her own studio weaving workshops. In 2020, Margo was the recipient of the Craft Council’s Collect Open Award for her large scale textiles installation Vexillum at Somerset House, and, in 2021, the bi-annual Turner Medal for ‘Britain’s Greatest Colourist’. She also gave the Turner Lecture, reflecting on her practice. 2022 saw her showing at multiple applied arts and craft fairs including Collect, London Craft Week, London Art Fair. In 2023, Selby exhibited at Art Miami, British Art Fair and Collect.

Margo Selby is represented internationally by Cynthia Corbett Gallery

MATT SMITH

b.1971, Cambridgeshire, UK

Move - A new collection of works by Matt Smith for Collect Art Fair 2024.

The vessels take The Grand Tour as their starting point. They consider the movement of people, and the ability to move. They provide a container within which to bring with you what you need to survive and thrive, as well as acting as a holding place for the sense of self brought with you from where you came.

Their title refers not only to physical movement, but also the generation of affect - the emotional responses of care and empathy that are needed to create a safe landing when people become displaced.

They draw on ideas of queer temporality - examining queer ways to think about history, space, relationships, notions of success and the need to move out of traditional family situations into new spaces.

Trouble With History

The work is created from a found, vintage, needlepoint which is unpicked and restitched by the artist. Based on paintings by known male artists, the needlepoints were originally produced for amateur, anonymous sewers to stitch. Idealised figures are presented in bucolic settings, their faces replaced by the artist with neutral repeating patterns which disturb the working of the image. By interrupting without substituting a definitive alternative narrative, the work leaves the reinterpretation open for the viewer, questioning the heterosexual constraints of such imagery and prompting a re-consideration of the sitters' skin colour and identity and questioning the viewer’s complacent acceptance of such imagery. Works from the series are held by the V&A, the Crafts Council, Brighton Museum and the National Museum of Northern Ireland.

Matt Smith is a multi award-winning artist based in Ireland and England. Acclaimed solo exhibitions include Losing Venus at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Flux: Parian Unpacked at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Who Owns History at Hove Museum and Queering the Museum at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. In 2015/16 he was artist in residence at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He holds a PhD from the University of Brighton and was Professor at Konstfack University, Stockholm.

In 2020 he was awarded the Brookfield Prize at Collect and the Contemporary Art Society acquired a body of his work for Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. His work is also held in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Walker Art Gallery, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, National Museum of Scotland, National Museum of Northern Ireland and the Crafts Council collection.

Matt Smith is represented internationally by Cynthia Corbett Gallery and was the winner of the Young Masters Maylis Grand Ceramics Prize in 2014.

EMILIE TAYLOR

b.1980, Sheffield, UK

“When once Thomas Toft’s slip-trailed images celebrated kings, queens, and the gentry, Emilie Taylor frames graphic images of life on the fringes of society, drawing from the urban landscape and its inhabitants.” - Penny Withers, Ceramic Review

“Emilie Taylor craftily infiltrates pottery’s decorative charm with hints of political dissent.” - Robert Clark, The Guardian

THE SACRAMENTS

The Sacraments takes as it’s starting point the wise or healing women that would have been part of every village or town. (16/17C)

Their medicinal knowledge of plants an herbs would have taken care of the community in every capacity from illness to birth control. Alongside their herb gardens the common land would have been a source of ingredients and inspiration.

The knowledge and power these women possessed (both in the community in general and regarding their perceived ability to control population with birth control), was perceived as a threat to the move to land enclosure and a patriarchal society with a more capitalist focus needing women to stay at home and reproduce the work force.

The rise of the ‘Witch Hunts’ across Europe in this period is seen by some (Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch) as a tool of propaganda used by King and Church to terrorise women and targeted women in these positions, (amongst others).

These plates celebrate these women and their knowledge, and use a contemporary model.

COPPER CARBONATE

These pieces use copper carbonate in the line instead of the oxide I used previously. The verdant green connects with the land and I like its more ‘fluid’ quality, it feels like moss or lichen growing and permeating the urban/ concrete landscape.

The copper is a more ‘volatile’ material than the oxide, so it reacts with the other materials in the kiln. This causes changes in the lustre where the edges meet the copper, and gives the aged pattina look, softening the lustre and giving the pieces the feel of an older artefact.

INSPIRATION

These pieces are developments from the time spent working with the National Civil War Centre in Newark and their collections. They are the most recent pieces. I made large pots for the show there using the oxides, then began using the copper on drawings on plates and felt inspired to begin using it on the bigger pieces.

The works focus on the women of the 16-17C, and are a response to how land enclosure and the move to a capitalist society impacted on womens role then and now. They celebrate womens knowledge, connection to the landscape and their activism during the period.

"The Latin and Italian are Chants or slogans used in the period to protest the way society was changing, the french was a chant used in the period to denigrate women and therefore support what was happening by those trying to enforce new attitudes. I have used that particular slogan as I think it is demonstrative of woman’s unique strengths and see it as celebratory. More context can be found in Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici.

I wanted to use slogans from across Europe, particularly as we face increasing separation from our fellow European’s, to demonstrate that the issues the work addresses- famine, enclosure and persecution and murder of women- were happening across Europe.

The shape of the pots for me is influenced by four things- agriculture, (its shape and rolled sack like top), a torso, a stone circle and a protest placard (hence the writing on the back)." - Emilie Taylor

An essay about the research and the work by Sara Read (Author and academic at Loughborough University) is available.

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Emilie Taylor uses heritage crafts, particularly traditional slipware, to interpret and represent post-industrial landscapes. Emilie is interested in the vessel or container as a metaphor for how we seek to contain communities, and community rituals, within British society, and has an ongoing interest in the firing process as alchemically potent and symbolic of change. 

Her work offers new interpretation to the contemporary urban context and its severance with ties to past community rituals. Large pieces and installations blur the boundaries between Gallery and Museum, Fine Art and the anthropological elements of Craft.

Emilie Trained in Fine Art (BA hons First Class) at Liverpool John Moores, graduating 2001 and has a Masters in Art Psychotherapy that informs her ideas about the anthropological significance of making in communities and community ritual. She has lectured about her practice at the Royal College, Cheltenham Literature Festival, on behalf of Arts Council England and the Crafts Council. As well as at many universities and art institutions.

Emilie has completed residencies in the UK and abroad, and has exhibited at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Ruthin Craft Centre, Gallery Oldham, and the Arts & Crafts House Blackwell. She had a solo exhibition (Tubthumping) which opened on March 8th 2023 at the National Civil War Centre. The body of work included in the show took as a subject the experiences of women in the early modern period and explored the similarities linking them and the experiences of women today. Her work forms part of public and private collections. In addition, Cynthia Corbett Gallery & its not-for-profit art initiative Young Masters Art Prize were invited by the Michelangelo Foundation to feature Emilie Taylor's artwork in their inaugural Homo Faber exhibition in Venice during the Biennale d'Arte in April 2022.

In 2024 Emilie will be working with Bradford Museums to create new pieces for their collection and will also be working with the Stradling collection in Bristol to respond to the slipware ceramics of Sam Haile held in their collection. Both projects will culminate in exhibitions later in the year.

She will also be leading an ongoing project with women exiting the criminal justice system who will be creating ceramic work for exhibition in 2025.

Emilie Taylor is represented internationally by Cynthia Corbett Gallery and was the winner of the Focus On The Female Young Masters Art Award 2021.

FREYA BRAMBLE-CARTER

b.1991, UK

Freya Bramble-Carter is a London-based ceramics artist, known for creating contemporary designs, often strongly inspired by a balancing flow of femininity and masculinity, appreciative of the power of nature and the universe we live in. Freya combines her lifestyle of imagining and working with clay as well as her life experiences and personal philosophies of changing delusion and enjoyment in one. She tries to live in the most authentic way true for her, to learn about life and expand.

Freya’s work ranges from fine homewares including plates and bowls to large outdoor sculptural pieces, water features for interior or outdoor spaces. Applying her talent to artisan glazes and handcrafting unique silhouettes, Freya's limited-edition pieces are designed to elevate and be a character of awe often by beauty and tactile appeal.

"We are a circle, infinite waters, we souls can’t be stopped."

In this new series for Collect 2024, Freya searches for the meaning of water and it’s continuous flow. The power of water in her life swimming everyday in appreciation as she talks to it. Water, the mover, destructor, basis of living organisms, blue reflecting the skies that have no end. A circle that has no start or end. Even a kink in the circle it follows and flows too. Water provides the vibrational centre to bring balance into balance. Is water a God ? What is water? What is a circle?

Before studying fine art at Chelsea College of Arts, Freya learned the craft of clay under her father Chris Bramble's guidance, and then built on this through teaching, but often enjoys the process of ‘unlearning’ the rules when it comes to making her own pieces. She relishes how you can do anything with clay, the fluidity of moulding and letting go. Every nuance of one’s touch and movement flows through the clay and imprints. Her awareness of this is a helpful tool, as clay is a teacher on many levels. Having always felt a strong physical connection to nature and growing up with clay at her fingertips, Freya allows flow and freedom in her work as well as some structure and strength. She believes in creating pieces that ‘impart with a piece of my soul’, that can become a spark of energy in the home.

Freya Bramble-Carter is represented by Cynthia Corbett Gallery.