Carolyn Tripp

Carolyn Tripp’s luminous individual porcelain is immersed in her admiration for Far Eastern ceramics, which were collected by her grandmother, and the gift from an uncle of a small exquisitely painted Imari bottle. Her feeling for Oriental form, most particularly the pots of China and Japan, was instilled early, but it wasn’t until her early thirties that she took up ceramics herself, eventually going to study at Camberwell College of Arts, London, under Richard Slee. She now lives and works in Wimbledon.

Her grandmother’s Oriental blue and white collection continues to make itself felt in the development of her elegant and fluid shapes, particularly bottles and jars, which if rooted deep in history, use ideas and images very much from our own time. Her pieces, collaged with hand screen-printed decoration has an iconography that is often split and fragmentary, suggesting a complex of ideas, experiences and sensations brought together across one surface. The curvaceous soft forms of her porcelain are enlivened by a vivid sense of colour too, all adding up to that sense of ‘ceramics as treasure’ that Philip Rawson wrote about so persuasively.

David Whiting