Stephanie Carlton is a Norfolk-based artist. She originally studied a 4-year Bachelor of Fine Arts (Hons) in painting and printmaking in her native Australia before moving to the UK in 2003 and working in arts conservation for many years.
She started working with ceramics in 2020, and it has become the primary basis of her work.
Her pieces are hand thrown in stoneware or porcelain, with a focus on clean shapes, expressive mark making, and building abstracted landscapes across individual pieces or series. Her work explores contrasts in light and dark, and the use of metal leaf as an overglaze surface for further marks and drawings, taken from her experiences of travelling through mountainous landscapes.
Her colour palette is restrained, exploring the subtleties of light, with flashes of colour as accents, or hidden surprises under lids or in interiors. The decorative finishes are created using hand painting, printmaking, and resist-layering techniques, with stains, oxides and glazes, and with gold and corroded copper leaf applied over the glazed ceramic providing further surfaces to manipulate.
She continues to work on prints, paintings and collage, which in turn feed back into the ceramics, with a shared continuity of mark making, line and process, and these motifs are also reflected in her range of porcelain jewellery which explore these themes on a miniature scale.
