Our featured Artist Members for July 2025 are Maree & Paul Allitt
Maree and Paul have worked together on creative projects since art school so it was natural that with their shared love of pattern, form and design that they would apply this to ceramics. They both worked for many years at Kettle’s Yard house and gallery in Cambridge so its close association with British Modernism and the St Ives School has tempered their oldest influences.
Handmade in our Cambridge studio, our slab-built porcelain ceramics are decorated using stencils and coloured slips. In the final firing, some areas are glazed, creating a deliberate interplay between matte and gloss surfaces, giving each piece a distinctive tactile richness. The clay is porcelain, chosen for its whiteness, delicacy and strength — fired to a high temperature so it is vitrified and non-porous. For the artists they are objects in their own right made for their intrinsic beauty rather than function.
Modernist art, architecture, and design have remained a constant source of inspiration. Our longstanding collaboration began in the 1970s when we studied Fine Art together, drawn to the clarity, innovation, and ideals of the modernist movement. That early passion continues to shape our work today, as we continue to inspire and challenge each other creatively.
Our process begins at home, where we create patterns, hand-build, and apply slip decoration, in a dedicated room. Once the pieces are dry, we carry them to our studio — a short ten-minute walk away — where the muckier work takes place: smoothing surfaces, mixing glazes and slips, and firing.
The studio is part of St Barnabas Press, a vibrant complex of artist spaces and an active print studio. It’s a compact space, just big enough for the two of us to work side by side. There’s also a separate area for our kiln.
Though the studio has to accommodate a lot, we always keep a tidy corner to display our ceramics — alongside a rotating collection of found and cherished objects that continue to inspire us.
Like many makers, our favourite piece is usually whatever we’re working on right now. There’s something exciting about seeing a new shape or design emerge — something we’ve never made before. Opening the kiln for the first time, not knowing exactly how it will turn out, always gives a buzz and sparks new ideas for where to go next.
Lately, we’ve been experimenting with transferring slip patterns from paper laser prints onto clay, adding texture and depth within our defined pattern shapes.
That said, there’s a small collection of mugs and jugs that will always be close to our hearts. They were the first pieces we made together. We don’t really make functional ware like that anymore — well we say functional, never had a drink of tea out of one.
Our influences span both fine art and ceramic traditions, reflecting a broad interest in the decorative and the abstract.
The graphic clarity of John Clappison’s designs and the narrative forms of Staffordshire flatbacks inform an ongoing interest in the decorative object and its role within everyday domestic space.
We also draw from post-war abstraction, the structured repetition found in the work of minimalists such as Frank Stella and the spatial explorations of Patrick Heron and the St Ives group continue to shape our approach to composition, where control and spontaneity sit side by side. So too the textured, layered surfaces in the work of Stephen Buckley and others resonate with our own processes of construction and surface treatment, offering a useful reference point for material experimentation.
A collection of Maree & Paul Allitt’s work is available to purchase in the gallery and via our online store.