Artist/Maker: Rosa Nguyen - Aberystwyth University School of Art Museums and Galleries

School of Art Collections

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

Rosa Nguyen

Born: 1960, Vietnam

Ceramicist. Nguyen makes figurative ceramic sculpture based on animal forms. She trained at Middlesex University and completed her studies in 1980. Before commencing postgraduate studies at the Royal College of Art she travelled to India and Nepal and visited Ladahk which provided inspiration for future work. Nguyen made drawings on her travels which remain an important element of her working method. While studying she made work with an emphasis on surface design: platters and dish forms with drawn figurative and animal forms. She also experimented with raku firing.

After leaving the Royal College, Nguyen received a Crafts Council Setting Up Grant and worked at the 4011/2 workshops in South London where she made large raku-fired pieces. She also worked to commission making portraits of pets. Fashion designer Ally Capellino asked Nguyen to make ceramic jewellery during the 1990s, allowing her to utilise her studies of seeds, pods, bones, and flowers.

More recently Nguyen has taken up botanical and natural forms. Small fruit and seed forms contrast with larger organic forms. She uses a range of clay bodies and paints the forms with simple red and white slips. Some are left unglazed while others are painted with washes of oxides. Matte white and crystalline glazes and an iridescent black glaze are also used. Some animal figures are left open as if emptied of their interior space. There is a freeness in the process of drawing which, when applied to the process of making, imbues many of her pieces with expressive, abstract qualities. The surfaces of the animal figures are often incised and drawn on. Rough and grainy textures and pierced and protruding marks are a feature of the smaller botanical forms.

Nguyen has shown work in many exhibitions in the UK including The New Spirit of Craft and Design (1989) and The Raw and the Cooked (1993-94) In 1995 she undertook a residency at Aberystwyth when the collection acquired an example of her work. She works as a visiting lecturer and part-time lecturer at the Camberwell College of Art and others.

Objects in the collections associated with this artist/maker