When Design Miami 2025, a worldwide design truthful, opens its doorways on December 2 in South Florida, it can rejoice its twentieth anniversary with one in every of Britain’s most imaginative and hardworking ceramic artists: Kate Malone.
The world-renowned potter — identified for her exuberant vases, pots and sculptural types which have been displayed in galleries and museums throughout the US, Europe and Asia — describes herself as “addicted to clay.” Quoting British sculptor Nicola Hicks, Malone usually repeats a mantra that fuels her creativity: “Work makes work.” To her, inspiration doesn’t precede effort — it follows it.
Her handcrafted items draw inspiration from the pure world, usually adorned with seeds, fruits, and natural shapes that ripple with vitality and promote for a premium: A small vase can go for hundreds of {dollars}.
Malone’s signature pumpkins, pineapples and gourds rejoice fecundity or progress and fertility, and the enjoyment of life itself.
“Optimism is my big thing,” she stated in a video name from her studio in Kent, southeast of London. “A big ebullient pumpkin or a pineapple with its leaves like a crown, stretching out” — they offer a feel-good response. They’re symbols of hospitality and pleasure,” she added.
That deep fascination with nature started in childhood. “My dad said, even as a tiny baby, I would sit looking at a daisy … or a blade of grass … as if I were studying it,” Malone recalled.
Mark Piolet, director at Adrian Sassoon, one of many UK’s main modern artwork sellers, who has represented Malone for years, stated, “Through combining her conscious appreciation of familiar ceramic forms with her innate creative drive, she transforms the utilitarian basis of her art into otherworldly sculptures that brim with a sense of the life force.”
With her work, he added, she is ready to “step beyond the vessel” in the identical approach as “other ceramicists, from Josiah Wedgwood to Picasso to Grayson Perry.”
Born in London, Malone, now 66, studied ceramics at Bristol Polytechnic earlier than incomes a grasp’s on the Royal College of Art. She favors a brilliant, vibrant palette that provides her work its unmistakable presence.
After many years of working with clay, Malone says her artwork has advanced — from sensuality to energy. “When I was in my 30s and 40s, the work was quite sexy,” she stated. “Now it’s kind of less sexy and there’s a different strength to it.”
While viewers won’t at all times grasp the deeper symbolism of energy and endurance, she believes the which means resonates subconsciously.
In 2019, she was honored with an MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) by Queen Elizabeth II for her companies to the sphere of ceramics.
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Malone’s most important studio was nonetheless in London. Feeling accountable for her assistants’ livelihoods, she shortly devised a plan.
“I said to them, ‘grab some clay, grab some molds, get home,’” she recalled. Then she refined her directions. “I then said … ‘you do these seeds, and you do these blackberries, and you do these acorns.’ And then I sent a taxi … I don’t know how we managed it. We got all the pieces back to Kent.”
Around the identical time, a plea arrived from southern India asking for about $1,000 to assist itinerant employees constructing a shelter within the woods — close to a pottery Malone had not too long ago visited. She determined to assist one of the simplest ways she knew how: by way of her artwork.
By promoting just a few of her ceramic pineapples on-line, Malone raised greater than $30,000 for the trigger.
Despite the isolation and worry, she displays fondly on that endeavor. “Covid was kind of lovely in that respect,” she stated.
Community engagement has at all times been on the coronary heart of Malone’s profession. She has created large-scale works for hospitals, faculties, parks, and public areas — together with a sculpture known as “Rise and Shine, Magic Fish” within the marsh that’s a part of the Waterworks Center Nature Reserve in Lee Valley Regional Park in East London.
One of her most bold tasks was accomplished in 2015, when she collaborated with architects to clad the facade of 24 Savile Row, in London’s Mayfair — a prestigious hub for luxurious procuring.
“Working with Kate on 24 Savile Row was an incredibly rewarding partnership,” Stephen Pey, board director at EPR Architects, the corporate that dealt with the mission, stated through e mail.
“The level of attention to detail was remarkable; every one of the 10,000 hand-glazed tiles is unique, shaped by her process of growing crystals at high temperatures. Effectively three-dimensional and in four differing textures — three white and one black with blue crystals — the tiles reflect and refract daylight,” he added.
Malone’s mastery of crystalline glazes units her aside. She has developed hundreds of glaze recipes, most by way of her personal many years of experimentation, and shares them freely with college students.
The glaze is utilized by hand to the inside and exterior of every pot or handcrafted sculpture and allowed to dry earlier than it’s fired.
Her vessels are given their signature patterns and luster by controlling temperature modifications within the kiln, which inspires crystals to bloom within the glaze. “The crystals, they grow around little nuclei of imperfection that’s dragged off the surface of the pot, because the glaze is running off like treacle (sticky syrup),” she defined.
As funding cuts squeezed ceramics packages out of British faculties, Malone determined to behave. In 2020, she co-founded FiredUp4, a charity that places clay into the fingers of younger folks by way of after-school golf equipment throughout the UK.
“With ceramics now less commonly taught … there is a general lack (of) familiarity with the magical transformation of wet clay, to gleaming vessel,” Piolet stated. Malone’s initiative hopes to rekindle that marvel.
Pottery is one in every of humanity’s oldest innovations, relationship again practically 30,000 years. For Malone, it’s excess of a helpful craft — it’s a religious apply.
“My decorative work is about me and my expression,” Malone defined, describing the completely different focuses of her artistic vitality, and added, for “the public arts … it’s about service to a place. And I think artists, I think as a craftsperson … we help things function.”