Ceramic Gallery

My name is Kim Foale and I am a Ceramic Artist. I fell in love with clay over twenty years ago but life and children intervened. I spent most of the nineties and early noughties raising my children and helping my husband build our home from recycled materials.

When my eldest child went to college in 2006 she dragged me along with her and I rediscovered my love for clay.

Once I had decided to get really serious about clay, I knew deep in my heart that I was a thrower, in fact I knew that I had been born to throw. In my first year of study, I spent hours and hours on the wheel and with each pot that I cut in half and threw into my recycle bucket, my conviction dimmed.

It took me three years of serious effort on the wheel to finally realise that I don’t actually like throwing all that much. I don’t like the time it takes to get set up, I don’t like sitting still and I really don’t like coming back to the work and turning  yesterdays pots.

I was taught by Dawn Oakford a slip casting maestro with a love of colour who fires in oxidation and Ben Richardson a woodfiring, production potter with a passion for digging his own clay and glaze materials.

Both of my teachers influences are strongly evident in my work and I have learned to balance my love of delicate slip cast pieces with my need to create rustic earthy slab formed platters.

Josiah Wedgwood the father of industrialised pottery production is quoted as saying, ” I will turn men into machines.” My work  is made in direct  response to the factory produced ceramics that you can find in any large department store.

I am not a machine. I deliberately leave fingermarks in the glaze, somewhere within my work and they are most evident at the base of my tall cups. My edges are uneven on purpose and I  put a lot of time and thought into each individual piece.

I make one off original art pieces, generally with an environmental story to them. I fire in reduction as well as oxidation and I like to use stone or bone tools when I am working, as my clay responds better to these natural materials.

The more I learn about ceramics the less I realize I know and I am happy to be a perpetual student of  my craft.

Please hover your mouse over the images to see the title of the work.