Jennifer Lee (OBE) is a major presence to have emerged from studio ceramics of the 1970s, when established, confining definitions of what ceramics should be were being fiercely contested. Lee has been making hand-built clay vessels for over forty years, using the ancient techniques of pinching and coiling with basic elemental materials: clay, water and oxides. The materials and method are central to her practice as a ceramicist, and to the resulting works.

Lee’s process begins with selecting the clay from an archive that began forty years ago. The clay is mixed with oxides to provide colour to the pieces before constructing them. In some of the mixes, the characteristics of the materials change as the clay matures. In other cases, the colour migrates from one band to another, producing distinctive haloes and speckles after the clay is fired. [1]

‘There’s a halo caused by the movement of the oxides, and it’s almost reversed on the inside because I’m bringing the clay up on the outside…and then on the inside I work with my thumb downwards, so I’m moving the colour in different directions which is why you get the different haloes.’ [2]

Lee’s hand-built unglazed stoneware pots are characterised by their smooth, iridescent matt surfaces, often formed into unconventional contoured shapes. Invariably the narrow base elegantly swells to a rotund body, and up to a wide, gently tapered, or sharply slanted, opening. There is a distinctive vitality and energy to the forms and the movement of colours across each vessel.

Lee makes large-scale, even life-size, drawings of her work after each vessel has been fired. She also makes notes before building a pot, and occasionally a sketch before putting the unfired clay into the kiln, afterwards recording the ways in which the coloured clays have been transformed. [3]

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