Work

Since January 2024, I have been  working with visual artist Phil Root researching the life and work of Katharine Pleydell-Bouverie.  KPB was an aristocratic potter, active from the 1920s to the 1980s, who pioneered the use of ash glazes in studio pottery in Britain.  After initial training with Bernard Leach in St Ives, she developed over 500 different ash glaze recipes in her lifetime.  Her investigations and experiments are unparalleled, but despite relative success and acclaim, she is not as well-known as her male peers.  As well as subverting class and gender stereotypes, KPB also had gay relationships that were not hidden from friends or family but which could possibly have contributed towards a diminished standing within the male-dominated 20th century pottery community.

Through our research, we are looking to elevate KPB through exploring her life and reinterpreting her recipes with an aim to create written and physical work from it.  We are hoping to recontextualise her work, so that it sits alongside ceramic artists/potters whose considered use of materials in relation to form is evocative of the landscape and meaningful within the Anthropocene.

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Firing at Lyde Green

Talisman

Ash glazes and wild clay

Sconces 

Throwing