Biography

Born in the London suburbs in 1948, Alison Britton is a leading British ceramicist, who is also widely recognised for her work as curator, writer and lecturer.  She was part of a radical group of Royal College of Art graduates in ceramics that emerged in the early 1970s. Working from a London studio over four decades, she has an extensive history of exhibitions and her work is featured in public and private collections worldwide.

She was awarded the OBE in 1990 for her services to the arts. Her retrospective that year toured the UK and concluded at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam. In 1996 a solo exhibition travelled to museums in Australia. In 2007 the exhibition ‘END, a collaboration of six ceramic artists from England, Norway and Denmark’, was at the Danish Museum of Art and Design, Copenhagen, and Bomuldsfabriken Kunsthall in Norway. In 2011 she contributed to ‘Postmodernism, Style and Subversion 1970 – 1990’, at the Victoria & Albert Museum, where she later had a retrospective ‘Content and Form’ in 2016. Her book ‘Seeing Things, Collected Writing on Art, Craft and Design’ was published by Occasional Papers in 2013.

Britton has also curated exhibitions, such as ‘British Ceramics’ for the British Council in 1984; and ‘The Raw and the Cooked’ in 1993, for Modern Art Oxford, which toured internationally. In 2009 she curated ‘Three by One, a selection from 3 Public Craft Collections for the Crafts Study Centre’, UCA, Farnham, and worked there again on ‘Life and Still Life’, an exhibition that combined her new work with collected objects, in 2012.

Between 1984 – 2018 she was a senior tutor in Ceramics and Glass at the Royal College of Art and in 2019 she was awarded an honorary doctorate. She is represented by Corvi-Mora London.