School of Art

School of Art Collections

Home

Contact Details

School of Art
Aberystwyth University
Buarth Mawr
Aberystwyth
Ceredigion
SY23 1NG

Tel: +44 (0)1970 622460

Fax: +44 (0)1970 622461

Email: artschool@aber.ac.uk

Display artist/maker:

Simon Carroll

Born: 1964, UK, England, Hereford Died: 2009, UK, England, Hereford

Ceramicist. Carroll was awarded a first class honours degree in Ceramics at the University of the West of England, Bristol where he studied under Mo Jupp and Walter Keeler. Afterwards he set up a workshop in Hereford where he worked with students at the Royal National College for the Blind.

He was inspired by disciplined but expressive work of Jackson Pollock and Peter Voulkos as well as Picasso’s freely modelled small figures. He was particularly interested in the bold simplicity of early slipware which he emulated, throwing the original form and manipulating it into dramatic shapes.

To decorate his jugs and other forms he used only three slips and a tin glaze, making marks by impressing, sgraffito and piercing. Carroll embraced the cracks and imperfections that appeared in the firing process. As well as working in clay, Carroll made ‘beach drawings’, creating large images in sand with tools such as a rake when he moved to Padstow, Cornwall.

Carroll famously had a pot thrown on his head by Martin Lungley at the International Ceramics Festival, 2003. After a solo exhibition in Aberystwyth called ‘Making Connections’ in 2004, a number of works were purchased for the collection with the help of a grant from the V&A Resource/Purchase Grant Fund.

His last major ceramic exhibition was at the Tate, St. Ives, Cornwall in 2006. He concentrated on abstract drawing after he was diagnosed with liver cancer.