Katie has a longstanding love of ceramics in all its historical, contemporary, cross cultural and artfully decorative guises. In her role as Associate Professor of Design at Falmouth University and leader of the award-winning research group, Autonomatic, she explored the creative integration of digital technologies into her ceramic practice, publishing and exhibiting her research in national and international contexts. Her recent work marks a return to a direct and intuitive engagement with clay.
Katie’s playfully modelled ceramic characters and scenes explore human relationships with animals and landscape, referencing chinoiserie designs, Staffordshire figurines and the vast and ancient history of clay as a means of human expression. Markmaking in clay, on paper or any available surface is fundamental to her practice, connecting the energy of the human hand with material forms.
Based in her studio at Art Centre Penryn in Cornwall, Katie enjoys working collaboratively with people from a wide range of disciplines, promoting creative dialogue and exchange through participatory projects as well as making her own work. She is currently working on Women of Cornwall, a project to create 50 hand made ceramic plates in collaboration with the new Art Centre, gathering stories and celebrating women’s roles in the county. In 2022, in collaboration with Grays Wharf CIC, she produced My Jubilee, a socially engaged project creating 70 plates created by 70 mostly over 70 year olds, commemorating their lives in the year of Queen Elizabeth II’s platinum jubilee. In 2019 with Rosanna Martin, she established Brickfield, a community brickworks based in a disused china clay pit in St Austell that aims to connect people with the material beneath their feet, developing their skills, confidence and sense of place. As a Whitegold Curator she was responsible for producing the Whitegold International Ceramics Prize which actively sought out and celebrated artists and artist’s collectives who work in and with community.
Katie graduated with a first class degree in Ceramics from Bristol Polytechnic in 1989, and completed an MA in Ceramics & Glass at the Royal College of Art, London in 1993 where she was a Darwin Scholar. As a Research Assistant at Grays School of Art in Aberdeen she was awarded a doctorate for her practice based research thesis, The Integration of New Technologies in to Ceramic Designer-Maker Practice. Katie worked as Research Fellow in the Centre for Research in Art and Design at Grays until she took on the role of course leader for 3D Design for Sustainability at Falmouth University, Cornwall in 1999.
In 2000 she became Reader in Design at Falmouth and in 2003 established Autonomatic, an award winning design research collective exploring relationships between craft making and digital technologies. Until 2015 she was Associate Professor of Design in the Academy of Innovation and Research where she worked on AHRC funded research projects, supervised PhD students and delivered All Makers Now, an international conference on the role of craft in 21st century culture.
“I love working directly and intuitively with clay. I want to be immersed in shaping and forming, in a conversation with its changing nature. In this process I am seeking ‘flow’: a state in which learned skills are challenged through creative risk taking, where time passes unnoticed and a satisfying state of deep absorption and a degree of inner peace can be achieved.
Working with clay, stuff of the earth, and heating it to phenomenally high temperatures in a kiln is provocative in a world of global warming: it is impossible to ignore the fact that the transformation of soft clay into hard ceramic takes huge amounts of energy. This material transformation is everywhere and unseen in everyday life, but it deserves our full attention. The process of making ceramics brings it into view.
In a world of global disasters, constant digital interruption, the sheer complexity of modern life, achieving a ‘flow state’ seems ever more important and simultaneously illusive. Practice is necessary!”