Polly Yates

A British artist and maker, Polly Yates trained in Fine Art at Wimbledon School of Art and at Central Saint Martins. She has worked with clay for more than ten years.

Her main focus is hand-built vessels, playful and elegant, sculptural and functional at once. She works mainly in stoneware, using coiling and pinching, the simplest methods there are, to arrive at a wide variety of forms. Hers is a process-based practice, in which very small decisions taken early on decide the result. The vessel's foot and the angle of its wall are the critical ones, and subtle alterations to them open up endless possibilities.

Periods spent in Japan and in the United States shape the work: delicate, thin-walled forms in whites and off-whites alone.

She is fascinated by how we live and by the way we shape our domestic surroundings, and makes objects that elevate the everyday and are meant to be kept forever.