Rosemary WREN

View in collection Rosemary Wren was born in Oxshott, Surrey, daughter of the potters Henry and Denise Wren and is best known as a maker of animal and bird figures. She attended Guildford School of Art where she was taught pottery by Helen Pincombe and sculpture by Willi Soukop. She made saltglaze pots for her diploma at the Royal College of Art (1945-1950). She joined her mother at the Oxshott pottery where she had a studio workshop, ran courses and made pots to her mother's designs as well as slipware, plant pots and thrown and modelled figures. She learnt to make hollow hand-built animal figures from Francine Delpierre and Albert Diato (1953). In 1957, she held her first exhibition at Heal's showing slipware, thrown pots for flowers and hand-built and slipcast animal figures. With her mother she helped to redevelop traditional techniques including saltglaze and raku. In 1970 Peter Crotty came to work at the Oxshott Pottery and soon after became her partner. He took on the decorating, glazing and firing of the animal figures. There are over a hundred animal and bird figures in their repertoire. Her system of working is first to draw from life and then handbuild the form using pinching and coiling. When they moved to Devon (1978) and then to Strathpeffer, Scotland, (1990) the Oxshott archive and pottery went with them. In the 1990s Rosemary Wren suffered eye damage but she continued to make animal and bird figures using a more intuitive touching process. She has written extensively on ceramics; in the 1990s she completed a text on the Knox Guild that Denise Wren co-founded in the second decade of the 20th century. She was a founder member of the Craftsmen Potters Association (1956) and was its first Chairperson. She was a gold medallist at the Prague International (1962). Her work is in many public collections and exhibitions.

Details

• Dates: 1922- 2013