Chloë Dowds is an artist based in Co. Wicklow, Ireland. After studying Fine Art Ceramics (BA Hons.), achieving a Higher Diploma in Art Education and completing her MA in History of Art and Architecture at the University of Limerick, Chloë moved to Thomastown, Co. Kilkenny to complete the Design and Crafts Council’s pottery skills training course.
Thrown stoneware pottery gas fired in reduction to Orton cone 9. The Knott, I make a range of pots from very large pots for the garden to small beakers. I use a locally mined stoneware clay and fire with wood.
My work explores the links between ceramics and geology and place, making pieces entirely from geological samples that I have collected from specific locations around the country, and that illustrate the ceramic qualities inherent in these materials. I use a variety of techniques depending on what I am trying to achieve. These include throwing, Slab building, coiling, press-moulding and pinching. I also use many methods of achieving textural surfaces. Jonathan Chiswell Jones works in reduction fired porcelain, using clay paste applied with a brush, to decorate with. 
CPA Selected Member - Chloë Dowds
She works primarily with porcelain on the wheel. Her range of contemporary porcelain tableware focuses on feminine and tactile forms. Her mugs are thrown finely enhancing the beautiful translucency of the porcelain. Touch is very important in the finished work and for this reason she polishes the base of each pot so that every surface of the piece is a pleasure to touch.
Chloë is also fascinated by colour interactions and is inspired by the colour theory of Josef Albers. She dyes porcelain by hand in her studio to make beautifully simple and elegant thrown vessels. These vessels are inlaid using coloured slip, turned and then polished. She also uses this colour palette to experiment with ceramic paintings and experimental hand-built forms.
Chloë has won numerous awards for her work and completed a number of international residencies as she continues to perfect her craft.
Chris Barnes
Workshop:
Ainstable,
Carlisle,
Cumbria CA4 9RW
Svend Bayer
I am interested in the way that very ordinary glazes are transformed by ash and embers in very long wood firings.
Matthew Blakely
There is an extremely varied geology in the UK with a spectacular range of rocks and minerals ranging from recent river deposits to some of the oldest rocks on the planet. Many of these have been quarried at some stage during the human occupation of the country, though mostly for processes other than ceramics, such as building or making roads.
The pieces that I make illustrate another way of looking at these materials and the colours and textures that they are capable of producing in the kiln: inspiration coming from the materials themselves, the qualities that they develop in firings and the places that I have collected them from.
I am working with a wide range of different rocks and clays, using firing types and temperatures that bring out the best in them. Increasingly my approach becomes simpler and simpler, taking ceramics back to its essence. I use these materials as unrefined as possible: rocks are crushed by hand, milled and blended to create the glazes, clays are often used as dug straight from the ground.
All of the work here has been fired in my wood kilns using waste wood that has grown where I live in Cambridgeshire.
David Brown
My work is fired in an electric kiln to 1250 degrees. ( oxidised stoneware )
Jonathan Chiswell Jones
He has have a full time assistant (Kerry Bosworth) and an apprentice (Pasha Manzaroli.
The lustreware is wheel thrown, and fired 3 times, to 1270; 1060 and 670 degrees C.
Jonathan has been a professional potter since 1974. Our workshop and showroom is in East Sussex.
