Alison Britton

About

Solo exhibition of dynamic new ceramic vessels by the influential artist Alison Britton. Marsden Woo Gallery is pleased to present a brand new body of work by the distinctive and influential ceramic artist Alison Britton. Here Britton explores her ongoing fascination with the dualities of disjunction and flow. She has created two series of pots, one in her usual buff clay, and the other in red clay. Both are decorated with poured slip and glaze, which allows her to ‘play with the definite and indefinite', and incorporates the risk of a fluid liquidity into her work. Britton's forms will be vertical, jar-like, and still include the addition of spouts, pipes and handles; flatter oval forms will also provide a different set of possibilities for the runs of slip or glaze. She explains ‘the forms may be echoes of each other in sort of pairs.' But, she points out, ‘all tendencies for that to end up looking like a chess set will be overcome' through her expressive, understated and unpredictable surfaces. BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES Alison Britton (b.1948) is one of the most important figures in British ceramics, being part of the generation that revolutionised this niche of the art world in the 1970s. She studied at the central school of Art and Design and the Royal College of Art, and is highly regarded as a writer, curator and lecturer, as well as a ceramicist. Her work has been exhibited internationally, and can be seen in major public and private collections worldwide, including the V&A, London, Royal Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, and Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris. She was awarded an OBE in 1990 for her services to the applied arts, and is a senior tutor at the RCA.