Pinched form

The striking decoration of this delicate egg-shell-thin pinched porcelain pot is inspired by patterns found in agate rock. Rogers’ surfaces and forms are inspired by the natural world. The surface has been coloured with oxides, contrasting translucent uncoloured porcelain with stained coloured areas. Four ribs run around the base to balance the form.

Mary Rogers was born in Derbyshire in 1929 and initially trained and worked as a graphic designer and calligrapher, studying at Watford Art School, St Martin’s in London, and ceramics at Loughborough School of Art, close to where she set up her first pottery studio. Rogers was one of the most admired of the generation of stoneware and porcelain hand-builders producing interesting work in the 1960s and 70s onwards.

Her ceramics, along with the comparable pieces of potters like Geoffrey Swindell, Peter Simpson and Deirdre Burnett, were a quietly sculptural foil to the sturdier qualities of the stoneware tablewares enjoying new popularity by the 1970s. Rogers subsequently moved her studio to Cornwall, but retired from making in 1991. [1]

Sim Panaser, November 2020

[1] https://www.oxfordceramics.com/artists/109-mary-rogers/overview/