Linda Styles

Cornwall based art potter, Linda Styles has a strong painterly approach to her ceramics and exciting range of colour intensity, which gives a fresh insight into contemporary ceramics today. Her pots are a luscious visual feast, dynamic sculptural forms, multi-fired and multi-surfaced.

Linda came to clay relatively late having led as she describes a ‘colourful’ life, making her debut appearances as an undergraduate at the Tate Gallery in St Ives (1994), moving onto Ceramic Contemporaries 2 at the V&A Museum, London (1995). Her work is held in public and private collections including the Gregg Museum of Folk Art, North Carolina, USA. She was commissioned by Sir Terence Conran to make a range of breakfast tableware. She is a lecturer in Contemporary Crafts; Course manager, curator and researcher at the Combined University of Cornwall, and has directed Arts Council, Heritage Lottery and EU funded public art projects at Falmouth’s Municipal Gallery.

Linda’s practice relates to the exploration of the emotive and instinctual, her main purpose being to use unorthodox expressions of surface and form. She mainly works from memory and reflection, mostly in her studio surrounded by chemicals, clay and kilns. Her range of colours are discordant, yet harmonic; gouged out infills underlaid with dense earth pigments and oxides, swathes of matt opaque interspersed with glassy pools of intense saturation. Colour, line and space merging background into object, object into background, suggestive, evocative and always open to interpretation. She is purposely referencing the essence of figuration within form and surface. “I like the juxtaposition of the vague and the definite. The distortions and angles give a recognisable personality that prompts an emotional response. Some tell a story of what I know of human nature good and bad. I continue to take absolute pleasure in the fact that collectors tell me that my ceramics enhance and brighten their lives just by being present and therefore part of the most intimate spaces...home.” Her work is exciting, vibrant, a heady mix of quirky, haunting and thoughtful.