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From 'Lucie Rie' by Tony Birks, 4th Edition,
Stenlake Publishing 2009

Lucie Rie
Born in 1902 in Vienna, where she studied at the Kunstwerbeschule under Michael Powolny from 1922 to 1926. In 1938 she moved to London, where she lived in Albion Mews. She opened a pottery and button-making workshop, and was joined in 1946 by Hans Coper. She was knighted an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1968 and Commander in 1981. She was made a Dame in 1991. From 1949 she exhibits her work from in many cities in Europe and America. Her first one-person exhibition was held in Japan at the Sogetsu Gallery, Tokyo and Museum of Oriental Ceramics, Osaka, in 1989. In 1990, she stopped making pots. Lucie Rie died in 1995, aged 93.

Lucie Rie incorporated a metropolitan feel into tableware for daily use. She also developed glazes that drew out both richness and depth after just one firing in an electric kiln, an example of her style of creating a new type of pottery with a wholly novel perspective by challenging conventional traditions while not abandoning classical techniques. Also during and until just after the World WarⅡ, she has made ceramic buttons for a living. Making buttons allowed her to gain experience and knowledge of working with glaze.

Photo by Jake Tilson

Jennifer Lee
Born in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, in 1956. From 1975 to 1979 she studied ceramics and tapestry at Edinburgh College of Art. She then spent eight months on a scholarship to the USA where she researched South-West Indian prehistoric ceramics and visited contemporary West Coast potters. From 1980 to 1983 she continued her work in ceramics at the Royal College of Art in London. Since then she traveled extensively. Jennifer Lee has had retrospective exhibitions of her work at the Röhsska Musset in Göteborg, Sweden in 1993, and the Aberdeen Museum and Art Gallery, Scotland in 1994. Her work is represented in major public collections worldwide, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Jennifer Lee lives and works in London and regularly exhibits worldwide.

Her pots are hand built and she has developed a method of colouring them by mixing metallic oxides into the clay before making. She does not use glaze. Her works, which reveal an unveiled influence from the pottery of ancient civilizations, invoke in their surfaces the traces and fluctuations of changes in nature.

Photo by Pedro gato lopez

Ernst Gamperl
Born in Munich, Germany in 1965. After graduating from high school he became a furniture maker apprentice and stumbled on woodturning by chance. Starting out an autodidact, he set up his own workshop in 1990. Ernst Gamperl has exhibited works in all over the world, including “the International Wood Turning Exhibition” (Victoria, Austria) in 1994, a traveling exhibition at Strenesse (Hamburg), Galerie Hilde Leiss in 1998, “Ernst Gamperl Volumes in Wood” at MDS-G in Tokyo in 2000, and so on. His objects are found in renowned museums all over the world, such as the Museum of Applied Art, Frankfurt and Fond national d’Art contemporain, Paris. He earned awards from the Danner Foundation in 1993 and 1999, and has winning prizes and awards as far afield as Germany, the USA and Australia.

With a motto “Learn from the wood”, Ernst Gamperl has continued his dialogue with trees as a material for around 20 years. He can see the intrinsic shapes within blocks of woods cut out from driftwood and fallen trees, and has continued to carve sculptures that follow their natural, dynamic forms through woodturning. Gamperl’s works are notable for their use of the knots found within the wood—so often removed in other wood pieces—as a mark of that tree’s history.