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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:

Rosemary Wren

Born: 1922, UK, England, Surrey, Oxshott Died: 2013

Ceramicist. Born to the potters Henry and Denise Wren, Rosemary Wren is best known as a maker of animal and bird figures. She attended Guildford School of Art where she was taught pottery by Helen Pincombe and sculpture by Willi Soukop. She made saltglaze pots for her diploma at the Royal College of Art (1945-50).

Wren joined her mother at the Oxshott pottery where she had a studio workshop, ran courses, and made pots to her mother’s designs as well as slipware, plant pots, and thrown and modelled figures. She learned how to make hollow, hand-built animal figures from Francine Delpierre and Albert Diato during 1953.

In 1957, Wren held her first exhibition at Heal’s, showing slipware, thrown pots for flowers, and hand-build and slipcast animal figures. With her mother she helped to redevelop traditional techniques including saltglaze and raku.

In 1970, Peter Crotty came to work at the Oxshott Pottery and soon after became Wren’s partner, taking on the decorating, glazing and firing of the animal figures. There are over a hundred animal and bird figures in their repertoire.

Wren’s system of working is first to draw from life and then hand build the form using pinching and coiling. When Wren and Crotty moved to Devon (1978) and later Strathpeffer, Scotland (1990) the Oxshott archive and pottery went with them. Despite suffering eye damage in the 1990s, Wren adopted a more intuitive touching process to continue making her figures.

Wren has written extensively on ceramics; in the 1990s she completed a text on the Knox Guild of Design and Crafts that her mother co-founded in 1912. She was a founder member and the first chairperson of the Craftsman Potters Association (1956). Wren was awarded a gold medal by the International Academy of Ceramics at Prague (1962). Her work can be found in many public collections and exhibitions.