Russell Wilson is an artist based in Derbyshire who has been making and developing his work over many years. As well as ceramics, he also works across an eclectic range of other media including painting, paper and needle felting, displaying a remarkable proficiency in such seemingly unrelated crafts. He initially studied to degree level in graphic design and has worked previously as a theatre scenic artist and for many years as an illustrator for a card company, before becoming a full-time maker.
With a deep love of nature and the natural world, Russell’s ceramic work focuses primarily on the animal kingdom in all its myriad of forms. He works instinctively, sometimes initially seeking direct reference for a particular chosen animal, but often allowing his imagination of how he envisions the piece to look to take over the need for any sense of direct realism. He is concerned more with form, simplicity and character, stylised but retaining a sense of the naive, but still controlled. He uses pinching and coiling methods to make his pieces using a selection of clays, carefully considered for their final firing colour that allow his pieces to work harmoniously together once finished. Any decoration or markings are applied using slips made from the same clays, often using simple tools or stencils. Some pieces feature applied chipped clay to add texture, a technique Russell has borrowed from antique Staffordshire pottery figures. All work is fired in an electric kiln.
He is strongly influenced by depictions of animals portrayed in Prehistoric cave paintings, primitive sculpture from history, his love of folk art, early English pottery and Staffordshire figures/ animals. A particular inspiration comes from antique 19th Century Noah’s ark animals, which were carved in wood in a naive, stylised way by people who had often never encountered the animals they were trying to depict. This had the effect of making the carvings slightly odd, or often wrong but ultimately gave them an endearing quality which he hopes in his work he someway achieves. He likes to arrange his finished animal sculptures in groups or processions, evoking and echoing the animals entering the ark, an imagined menagerie of sorts!
Russell will be in our Winter Exhibition, starting 8th November 2025!
