Mary Stephens’ initial training was a BA in Fine Art from Bretton Hall in the mid 90s. After which she was very lucky, getting a graduate apprenticeship at Pembridge Terracotta in Herefordshire, training from scratch to throw garden flower pots. Within six months she went from having never thrown a pot to throwing six kilogram terracotta pots.
About twelve years ago Mary retrained as a yoga teacher and then came back to studio ceramics, reteaching herself to throw on the wheel and techniques such as firing, glazing, pulling handles, through trial and error. Her current body of work combines both practices, which are both very significant to her: both ceramics and yoga need focus, understanding, knowledge and control. “Both bringing you back into the moment, asking you to concentrate and respond to what is or isn’t happening.”
Mary now mainly throws functional ware like cups or teapots in porcelain because she likes the strength it has even when thrown fine, giving objects more potential to be functional for longer. This allows the time and energy that goes into making to have less environmental impact and for the object to become part of daily life and ritual. She combines white and black porcelain with hematite inclusions, to capture movement and process.
When working in clay Mary wants her work to use and explore the properties of the material and the process. So these objects push the porcelain to limits where it’s almost at or is breaking, where it becomes so thin that light can move through, connecting object, material, viewer and environment. She loves the strength of porcelain: “holding, containing, allowing any breaks, allowing the beauty of imperfection to be seen, held”.