NEWS

An award winning ceramic artist, Ashley Howard's career combines teaching with making. Having lectured at universities across the UK, published numerous articles on technical and aesthetic subjects and won funding for research into international ceramic ventures over the years, Ashley's investment in the ceramics community continues to benefit many.

Initially studying at what is now the University for the Creative Arts, Rochester, and having gone on to complete a masters at the Royal College of Art in 2001, Ashley has continued to explore motion and movement within his porcelain pieces.

Heavily influenced by ritual and ceremony his work is primarily thrown on the wheel and occasionally incorporates varying degrees of manipulation. Ashley’s addressing of the surface is best described by Adrian Bland who wrote, Howard himself has spoken of his early reticence with regard to decoration, his holding back from being a ‘potter that paints’ (Howard, 2018), and for some time his idiosyncratic mark making remained bound within the sketchbook. Such reticence was perhaps first confronted technically, with research into the right materials and processes, the right temperatures, to push the mark-making into the pot, so that the surface is not sitting on the form, but rather becomes integral to it, and the pot retains a ceramic integrity that somewhat refutes the notion of clay as canvas; ‘the glaze has pulled the marks right in’ (Howard, 2018).