School of Art

Contact Details

School of Art
Aberystwyth University
Buarth Mawr
Aberystwyth
Ceredigion
SY23 1NG

Tel: +44 (0)1970 622460

Fax: +44 (0)1970 622461

Email: artschool@aber.ac.uk


Display artist/maker:

Alison Britton

Born: 1948, UK, England, Middlesex, Harrow

Ceramicist. One of Britain's best-known ceramic artists, noted for her boldly painted sculptural vessels. She completed a foundation course at Leeds College of Art (1966-1967), trained in ceramics at the Central School of Art and Design, London and studied at the Royal College of Art where she originally took up photography (1970-1973) but turned to tile work under the tutoring of Hans Coper. She was among the group of women who emerged from the Royal College in the 1970s and moved into the forefront of new developments in ceramics. Her early work had a strong graphic, and even narrative element, but since the 1980s she has worked in a more sculptural way. Her work plays with the notion of function and challenges the distinctions drawn between the categories of art and craft. Moving away from pictorial narrative, bold, abstracted painterly decoration is applied to sheets of clay which are then cut and constructed, using a slab building technique; Britton feels opting for this simple method allows a greater scope for the imagination. Sources have shifted from prehistoric artefacts to the mediaeval Far East to twentieth century painting and architecture, most particularly the work of Jackson Pollock. Britton has also made her mark as a lucid critic of contemporary crafts and has written a number of influential catalogue essays and, since 1984, many exhibition pamphlets for Contemporary Applied Arts in London. In 1993 she jointly acted as curator on the groundbreaking exhibition The Raw and the Cooked with Martina Margetts. She teaches part-time at the Royal College of Art. She received an OBE in 1990.

Objects in the collections associated with this artist/maker

'Millenium Mug' C1370 Ceramics

[Tilted pot with two spouts] C1183 Ceramics




 
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