With the continuing shortage of high quality outlets for contemporary crafts in Britain’s second largest city, the RBSA’s craft cases have increasingly been helping to fill an important gap.
Now it has taken another step forward with its first open submission exhibition devoted to studio ceramics, attracting 127 works by 27 makers. It it looks like a successful experiment, to judge from the general standard and the number of red spots indicating sales.
There is a very wide range of work reflecting different materials, styles and techniques, and quite a few names that will be familiar to aficionados of contemporary studio ceramics.
Outstanding among them are North Wales-based David and Margaret Frith. David Frith shows some dramatic, slabby stoneware bottles and a variation on a long line of tall jugs, but the work of his I would have most liked to take home is a large platter in a subtle range of greys and browns, with contrasting rough and shiny glazes. Both of Margaret Frith’s ginger jars have already found buyers, and quite right too.
Durham-based Eddie Curtis’s porcelain vessels with copper red glazes are another highlight, and illustrate the collectibility of contemporary ceramics. One of his pieces has just been bought by Britain’s oldest museum, the Ashmolean in Oxford, but for a little over £100 you can have a small but representative, museum-quality piece on your mantelpiece.
Although her forms are sometimes a bit fancy for my taste, Herefordshire-based Bridget Drakeford also produces works with sumptuous red copper glazes.
Moving into more playful territory, I enjoyed Linda Gates’ jugs with their nostalgic mid-20th Century designs of clothes, pin-ups and domestic appliances. And although I’m not quite sure that they’re my sort of thing, Pierre Williams’ earthenware sculptures of male nudes on columns, all decorated in traditional blue-and-white patterns, are a tour-de-force.
* Until Sep 5 (Mon-Fri 10.30am-5pm, Sat 10.30am-5pm, Sun 1pm-5pm; admission free).
