Jennifer Lee’s hand-built pots are instantly recognisable, and have become one of the hallmarks of British studio ceramics since their emergence in the early 1980s. These apparently simple container forms, stratified by metallic oxides, as if we are looking at sections and layers of earth or rock, meditate on the fundamentals of the vessel form, and in an elemental language that recalls some of the earliest pots, from the Mediterranean to Northern Europe. Lee’s pots tap such traditions to explore space, volume and contour, movement and stillness, the landscape of the ground under our feet, the textures and colours of our natural and human-made environments. Lee was born in Aberdeenshire, Scotland in 1956 and studied at the Edinburgh College of Art and London’s Royal College of Art from 1980-83. She lives and work in south London.
David Whiting