John Pollex

John Pollex’s pots are, like their maker’s personality, larger than life. His vivid luminous ceramics, essentially vehicles for his abstract love of colour, develop the tradition of slipware in his own inimitable way. He studied at Sir John Cass’s School of Art and then served as a technician on the influential Harrow Ceramics Course before working with Bryan Newman and Colin Pearson. Since 1971 he has lived and worked in Plymouth, and in 1984 changed creative direction, drawn as he was to the colour and verve of contemporary American ceramics. He began to use his functional forms as a canvas for his explanation of strong new vibrant slips, an art clearly influenced by his love of painters like Howard Hodgkin, Robert Natkin and Patrick Heron, as well as his appreciation of Aboriginal, Tibetan, Buddhist and Zen art.

David Whiting