Paul Wearing English, b. 1967

Paul Wearing is an award winning ceramicist based in the vibrant Fireworks Clay Studios cooperative in Cardiff where he has been a member since 2007. He is a Selected Member of the Craft Potters Association of Great Britain and was elected to their Governing Council in 2018. Having studied ceramics to post graduate level Paul has exhibited widely across the UK and internationally.

Paul's hand-built sculptural vessels are inspired by our interconnectedness with nature’s seasons and cycles; how evidence of lived moments in nature speak to our own experience of being human, of being nature. He is drawn to the vessel as symbolic form echoing the built environment and to contrasting textures resulting from energetic forces of growth and decay which interact and transform the sense of order.

Paul works with a grogged stoneware clay and in contrast, porcelain. The forms are made mostly with coiling techniques, a slower contemplative process, but Paul also incorporates some press moulding and slab building enabling faster working.

Paul embraces contrasts of control and chance within the glazing process. The surface is rendered through brushed layers of slips and glazes reacting within oxidised firing processes. Selective volatile materials bring surface disruption through blistering, cratering and crawling. Glazing and firing processes are repeated until optimum depth and complexity of surface appears.