For Felicity Aylieff, pots are the perfect form. “They may not be fashionable,” says the professor of ceramics and glass at the Royal College of Art, who has been teaching and practising for more than 40 years. “But they’re important — I love that you don’t have to explain a pot.”
The ceramicist’s mightiest works to date go on show in a major solo exhibition at Kew Gardens next month. Such is their scale and presence that visitors will quickly discover that Aylieff’s pots definitely do the talking. Aylieff’s intention, in part, is to overturn perceptions of porcelain as a fragile tabletop art. At Kew, she will be filling the Shirley Sherwood Gallery with 40 of her eye-catching forms. Seen en masse, this dynamic display places floral vases precision-painted with Fencai enamel alongside porcelain vessels expressively daubed in cobalt blue oxide. It promises to be spectacular.
Standing guard outside on the lawn will be a colossal pair of painterly blue and white obelisks — one of which is her largest to date, measuring more than 17ft tall — taking Aylieff’s big pot energy to new heights. “I want to bring a sense of awe and excitement and wonder,” she says. “So people stop and think: ‘How on earth do you do that?’”
The answer lies thousands of miles away in the city of Jingdezhen. In 2005, the axes of Aylieff’s life shifted dramatically when she and her husband, the renowned Japanese potter Takeshi Yasuda, whom she met in the 1990s, began travelling to southeastern China. “It is said that people in Jingdezhen live and breathe porcelain — known as China’s ‘white gold’, so prized have its qualities been throughout history,” she says of the ancient porcelain capital, where production spans more than 1,700 years. The clay is imbued with an unsurpassed purity and robustness that has allowed Aylieff to explore her practice anew.
In Jingdezhen, she encountered a handful of family-run workshops, including the Xin Liang Big Pot Factory, which traditionally supplies large Buddhas and vessels for hotel lobbies and political venues in China. “I saw a chance to start making my work on a much larger scale,” she says. “I realised I could employ their specialist techniques, but using my own vocabulary.”
The process of observation proved transformative. Rather than replicate her earlier, more minimal aesthetic, the larger forms gave Aylieff a bigger, broader canvas for more experimental work. She began painting, in honour of China’s signature ceramics, in blue on to white using the kind of enormous horsehair brush usually reserved for calligraphy.
“I’m always curious,” she says of what the end result will be. “I never stay still with my work. It constantly changes along with my life.”
One of the principal joys of creating this show was exploring Kew’s archive of more than 200,000 botanical drawings and prints. “The sensitivity and clarity of these drawings appeals to me,” she says, carefully leafing through the early 19th-century depictions of Morning Glory, hibiscus, peony and tulips, which formed the starting point for her colourful Fencai pots. In contrast to the exuberance of the single-fired blue and white works, which are painted at speed, the Fencai are exacting in their finely wrought floral composition. “It’s more contemplative,” she says of their pixel-like dots. “The big blue and white pots are the show-offs.”
During the three-year creative process, Aylieff has divided her time between China and her home just outside Bath (though until 2022 she lived in London, just across the water with a view of Kew). So established is Aylieff in Jingdezhen, she set up her own studio, Redhouse Ceramics together with Yasuda.
Despite the language barrier, Aylieff has carved deep roots. She calls her crew of co-creators her “big pot family” and compares pulling off her monumental vessels to scaling to the summit of a mountain. “People say how wonderful it is to have a solo show, but there’s a whole army behind it,” she says of the throwers, trimmers, glazers and kiln firers who help realise her vision. “I relish what you can do with more than one pair of hands.”
The scale of Aylieff’s practice reveals pottery at its most physical. It takes the Herculean strength of four throwers to produce the big ware — which is made in sections, before being assembled at full scale. “It’s like ballet,” says Aylieff of the theatrical orchestration, pulling up a video on her phone in which the lead thrower, his face contorted in concentration, pushes his arm determinedly into the wet clay. Such is the force of the vast wheel, it demands three further throwers to hold him in place. “I did once fall in,” admits Aylieff. “They loved it.”
Aylieff finds the instinctive act of painting these vast vessels, which requires ladders and scaffolds, demanding, but also exhilarating. Though self-assured and direct in person, she admits to being boldest in clay. “I do not want my work to be shy,” she says. Always ambitious, now at 70, she is fearlessly so.
“Hers is a big world,” says her gallerist Adrian Sassoon, who has placed her creations everywhere from private houses in the US and Australia, to Chatsworth and the Victoria and Albert Museum. But how does the big ware sit in a home? “There’s a beauty and poise to these objects. In the centre of a room they become these friendly personalities.”
‘Expressions in Blue: Monumental Porcelain by Felicity Aylieff’ is at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, from October 26 to March 23 2025
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