Kay Austen's Glacier Gallery Fine Studio Pottery

Pottery is in my blood. It came as no surprise when my Aunt, a tireless digger into the family's past, found that my great grandfather was a potter.

In England, the history, techniques and the design of ceramics formed an integral part of my higher and professional education at Medway College in Kent, at Wolverhampton Polytechnic, where I received my Bachelor of Arts Degree and at Sussex University, where I completed teacher training.

Those years provided a valuable foundation on which to base my work with clay: the most technically difficult, and yet most spiritually rewarding of media forms.

My multifaceted and eclectic body of work includes thrown, altered and handbuilt stoneware and porcelain, fired to cone 6 and 10 in oxidation and reduction, Raku and pit fired pieces and more recently, majolica decorated earthenware.

My high fired pieces, made for the kitchen and dining room as well as for display of plants and flowers are based on classical forms, carefully altered at the wheel.

Wide, richly glazed platters for displaying and serving food, ample bowls, baking dishes with luscious, deep surfaces, elegant, well balanced teapots, light, comfortable mugs, serene, one of a kind vases inviting contemplation, are all part of my high fired functional work.

Raku and pit fired pieces offer me an opportunity to use my play instinct; to indulge my imagination completely. They transform clay into discrete ideas, going beyond mere dexterity. I manipulate the clay, while the firings with all their vagaries, are the final arbiters of success.

Majolica is vibrant, brilliantly coloured low fired decorated earthenware. Its glazed surfaces ask to be touched and it affords a celebration of life itself. I produce Majolica dishes to be used at the table, vessels for plants and flowers and giftware.

While I am inspired by ancient ceramics and by form, texture and colour in nature, my work is uncompromisingly contemporary in character.

Because I want to make pieces which come fully to life with use, you, as the buyer participate in the final realization of my work, as you hold a warm stoneware mug of coffee in both hands at breakfast time, as you arrange a tomato salad on a cobalt blue glazed platter, as you pour fragrant tea from a teapot glazed purple with turquoise and cream streaks, as you spoon asparagus soup from a black metallic glazed soup cup.

As an artist and an educator, I value being a party to others' sense of wonder, self discovery and delight in this timeless medium.

I have traveled extensively throughout North and South America and Europe, but my work has seen more of the world than I have. It is in private collections throughout the world and has been shown at a number of galleries in England and of course, right here in B.C

BY APPOINTMENT

email: kay@austeneverest.com
tel: (604) 898-9775

Photography by Doug Burne

View more on Kay's website:
Kay Austen Pottery
www.kayausten.com