School of Art

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:

Jacqueline Poncelet

Born: 1947, Belgium, Liege

Ceramicist. She trained at Wolverhampton College of Art (1964-1969) where she studied ceramics, and subsequently at the Royal College of Art where she worked with industrial ceramic processes (1969-1972). Whilst teaching in art colleges she established herself as a maker of fine bone china creating delicate cup and bowl forms with painted, transferred and carved decoration using industrial techniques. The work was slipcast in moulds but each was transformed into an individual piece by carving and shaving the surface. A major source of inspiration for this work came from Roman glass. After 1977 she began to make hard-edged, angular stoneware forms with complex elaborate painted decoration. A need for further change and new stimuli, led to a British Council Arts Fellowship to travel in the USA (1978). The textural qualities of American landscape and architecture and colour and line in American painting encouraged her to produce slab-built earthenware. The main subjects were boat and shoe-like forms with all over pattern and an emphasis on the edges of the forms. Experimentation with earthenware and stoneware clays and surface quality and colour became a major preoccupation of this period of her work. In the mid 1980s she worked at Bing and Grondahl in Denmark selling work in Copenhagen and New York. Gradually the forms became more sculptural and abstract, exploring ideas of containment and enclosure whilst also making reference to the human body and zoomorphic forms. A major exhibition of her work was organised by the Crafts Council (1981) and an exhibition of sculpture was held at the Whitechapel Gallery (1985). Together with Glenys Barton, Alison Briton and Carol McNicoll, Jacqui Poncelet was considered one of the most innovative and avant-garde ceramicists to come out of the Royal College of Art in the 1970s. She is married to the sculptor, Richard Deacon. She now sees herself as working in the field of fine art rather than ceramics or craft. Her work is represented in the Victoria Albert Museum and many other public collections

Objects in the collections associated with this artist/maker

[Ceramic piece] C1051 Ceramics



 
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