Without Colour at Leeds Craft Center

The Leeds Craft Center and Design Gallery is tucked away under the Leeds City Art Gallery. The Art Gallery itself is combined with a library and is both an interesting space and contains some fancinating old and modern works. Its specifically orientated towards sculpture and I suppose thats where the craft gallery fits in.

For those who don’t know by day I’m a graphic designer but by night I’m a very crafty person and one of my loves is pottery – either throwing or hand built it doesn’t really matter which. The Without Colour exhibition interested me specificially because it was mostly ceramic work.

Much of the work on show was a variety of clays and techniques. The most striking pieces were porcelain – I’ve never used it before but I’ve always admired the glazing colours that porcelain achieves.

Anyway some of the most impressive work on show was that of Tina Vlassopulos who I’m a growing fan of. Her tremendously simple and subtile works have a graceful simplicity to them and yet remain as functional objects at the same time. Its that balance of function and form which really makes craft pottery useful – being able to apriciate the handmade object every time its being used.

Other works of note were by Pam Dodds whos work can be seen on the above flyer. What was noticable about her work was the contrast between the colours used in glazing the pots – the heavy contrast with modern forms.

What always gets me when looking at craft pottery in gallery shops is the price and also the size of some of the objects. As a potter myself I understand the time and effort that goes in to crafting every piece, however I do think there is a key balance between price and object. I for one think that its unreasonable to expect to pay £16 for a mug or £60 for a teapot when you can go into a shop and pay a lot less for these items in any high street shop. Pottery is a craft where eventually you’ll have to use these objects and when the price is so high all you’ll have is an object d’art that if you broke it would be too expensive to replace.

Although the space itself was quite small it did contain some great work by very skilled crafters – not just pottery. If your in Leeds its definately worth checking out.

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