Meet the Maker Producing Transfixing Vessels of Candy Ribbon-like Ceramics
London artist Steven Edwards crafts multidimensional works on view with Vessel Gallery and incorporated into the permanent collection of Chatsworth House
Many who encounter Steven Edwards’s works for the first time presume that they’re edible. The ceramic artist’s pastel pieces can resemble saltwater taffy that’s been stretched and twisted into an undulating shapes, while the black examples with a more reflective glaze are a dead-ringer for woven licorice. “I guess there is a slight illusion to the surface,” says Edwards. “I quite like it when people don’t understand it.”
Edwards’s vessels are both thrown and hand-built using a process he developed while getting his master’s degree at the University of the Creative Arts in Farnham. “I set out rules of making, parameters of repetition, compression and cut,” he explains. “I followed these three actions as a starting point.”
The base vessel is thrown on the wheel, as are all the forms that he eventually affixes over top which are enhanced with color and striations, manipulated into dynamic shapes, and then affixed to the base one at a time. His larger pieces have well over 100 components and can take several months to make.
Edwards’s fascination with clay began quite innocently as a child in the village of Bream, Gloucestershire. “We used to dig clay from the rivers near us, make little figures, and put them in the open fire at home, with no understanding that was the alchemy of how you do it. It’s a wonder they didn’t explode,” he recalls.
The youngest of four boys, he became enamored with—and very good at—drawing. A seminal moment came when an art teacher asked the class to recreate her using clay. He now says he “thought nothing of it,” until he enrolled in a two-year program at the Royal Forest of Dean College, where ceramics was part of the course. He was a natural. With his teachers’ encouragement, he pursued a degree in applied arts, with a specialization in ceramics, at the University of Derby. His professors were so taken with his work that, without telling him, they submitted it for publication in the Ceramics Review. “It was a very big deal, and it gave me confidence,” he says.
Post graduation, Edwards took a bit of a detour, spending a few years in the French Alps and earning another degree, this time in graphic design. Ceramics became a side gig as he built what became an award-winning graphic design career, with big corporate clients like Vodafone and the BBC. But he hit burnout, and the pull of the wheel was too great. “It really does draw you back all the time,” says Edwards, who developed his process and started showing his work after earning his master’s degree. He was chosen for the British Ceramics Biennial in 2019 and signed with Vessel Gallery in 2022.
Today, Edwards’s work is collected by art aficionados like Christian Louboutin; in addition, he runs the ceramics program at Kingston University in London. “I keep coming back to the word ‘curiosity’ with everything I’m doing,” he says. “I don’t want to get to the place where I am totally happy [with the work], because then I’d think I’d done it, and that would be it.”