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CoCA at Ceramic Art London – Fiona Green

Fiona Green, Collections Facilitator for Art, talks about the art and marketing team taking CoCA to this year’s Ceramic Art London event.

Ceramic Art London is a yearly event which takes place at the Royal College of Art in London.

It is hosted by the Craft Potters Association and helped by Ceramic Review magazine. It is one of the biggest showcases of contemporary ceramic art in the country featuring work from both national and international makers.

There were 80 stands showing maker’s work as well as a fantastic Discovery Programme organised by ceramist Felicity Aylieff.

It was held over the weekend 17th – 19th April and York Museums Trust were invited to have their own stand to help with the promotion of the art gallery’s new Centre of Ceramic Art (CoCA) which opens on the 1st August this year.

Over four days the art team consisting of Helen Walsh, Curator of Ceramics, Gaby Lees, Assistant Curator of Learning and Fiona Green, Collections Facilitator for Art along with the marketing and communications team of Rachel Wade, Lauren Masterman and Katy Duddell descended upon London, ready to show off what the new Centre of Ceramic Art had to offer.

It was a tiring weekend standing on your feet all day and chatting away about CoCA to visitors as well as handing out as many leaflets as possible but we thoroughly enjoyed it and gained some new experiences working on an exhibition stand.

With us we took four of our ‘star’ pots from the collection to entice people over and get talking to us about CoCA and studio ceramics.

They certainly worked a treat and tended to be the main focus for conversation starting, with visitors enjoying being able to be so close to the pots picking out the smallest details. The pots are examples of the four collectors in our collection.

The Shoji Hamada teapot (YORAG: 935.81) was a gift from the Very Reverend Dean of York, Eric Milner-White who was a pioneer in collecting studio pottery.

When he first started collecting, it was not very well known subject meaning he could collect what would become some fantastic pieces. He especially liked stoneware pieces.

The Hans Coper piece (YORYM: 2004.1.804) belonged to collector Bill Ismay who was the most prolific collector of studio pottery in post-war Britain and bought some of the biggest names in studio pottery which he kept in his small terraced house in Wakefield next to the work of lesser known artists.

The Lucie Rie bowl (YORAG: 2009.4.2) belonged to collector Henry Rothschild who founded the Primavera Gallery in London in 1945. He took great pride in personally selecting all the pieces for his exhibitions and could always spot the best pieces of work at the studios he visited.

And finally the Gordon Baldwin piece (YORAG: SHAW.701) which belongs to collector Anthony Shaw.

Anthony has recently given his collection to the art gallery on long-term loan and is in the process of curating his own space within CoCA showcasing his collection in a domestic setting.

This was the first year that a new award was introduced at CAL called The Craft Pottery Charitable Trust Emmanuel Cooper Prize. It is funded from a bequest made by Emmanuel Cooper to the Craft Pottery Charitable Trust.

Each year the award will enable a British museum to acquire a new piece for their permanent collection. We were very excited as we were the first museum given the privilege to choose some work from one of the exhibitors to take place in our permanent ceramic collection.

This meant that Helen and Gaby got to go shopping on the preview night of Ceramic Art London, it was very hard to pick work out as they were all so lovely but we they had to make sure that the work would fit within our current collection as well as bringing something new and exciting.

We were delighted to be able to acquire two lovely works by Annie Turner as she is someone whose work we admire and had not yet represented in the collection.

One is ‘oyster bag’ and the other is a two part piece called ‘mussel box and sieve’.

We chose these pieces as they have strong connections to our location near the river Ouse and to our existing collections (not just ceramics but archaeology, geology, natural science and social history) and we will be able to use them in a wide variety of contexts.

The pieces will certainly go on display when we launch CoCA in August.

It was an honour to be allowed to be part of Ceramic Art London and everyone we spoke to seemed really positive and interested in our Centre of Ceramic Art and we had lots of people sign up to the newsletter.

We shall go through it all again in July when two separate teams will be visiting Art in Clay in Hatfield and the International Ceramics Festival in Aberystwyth.

I shall keep you updated on them.