Frances Priest: ceramic artist

Learn to speak the language of ornament through colourful decorative ceramics.

About Frances

Leith-based artist Frances graduated from Edinburgh Art College in 1999 with a 1st class honours degree and postgraduate diploma in ceramics.

Since then her work has been shown across the UK, and in many different countries including America, Denmark, Italy, Japan and Korea, and she has undertaken residencies in Thailand and Scotland. Her work is included in a number of UK collections including the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Fitzwilliam Museum and the National Museum of Scotland.

It was during her travels in Japan, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia that she conceived the ideas for her ‘Gifts & Occupations’ collection, an expanded version of which she has created specially for Meet Your Maker.

Frances regularly works on educational projects across Scotland in schools, colleges, arts centres, museums and galleries. She is co-founder of HEATWORKS, a project that  delivers creative ceramic workshops for corporate team building events and away days and continuing professional development workshops for primary and secondary school teachers.

Frances’ vision

Gifts & Occupations is an ongoing body of work that explores Fran’s experiences of pattern and ornament encountered during her travels. As an outsider and tourist, she uses the language of ornament as a means of understanding a particular place or culture and expressing her identity in relation to it. The objects that make up this ongoing and growing collection are intended to act as open-ended conversations about the universal language of ornament and our relationship to it.

She is also interested in using craft processes as a tool for thinking. Her collection is designed to be handled, examined, grouped, compared and composed, thus endowing the objects with an ongoing life, beyond the studio and the gallery space, and exploring the role of audience and ownership in the evolution of their meaning.