An exploration in texture and colour.

Shirley Vauvelle is a British artist whose multifaceted practice encompasses ceramics and painting. From an early age, she exhibited a natural inclination for creation—sewing dolls’ clothes and crafting objects from found natural materials like seashells. This lifelong engagement with making laid the foundation for a career that spans roles as a designer, educator, gallery owner, and now a maker and artist exhibiting work across the UK.

Shirley’s formal art education began with a foundation course at Chester College, followed by a BA (Hons) in Textile and Surface Design from Leicester Polytechnic in 1987. Her background in textiles profoundly influences her current work; she perceives a significant overlap between painting and ceramic making, often treating ceramic surfaces as canvases to explore texture, colour, and form.

Self-taught in ceramics, Shirley works from a light-filled studio in her home near the coastal town of Filey, East Yorkshire—a space that has been featured in various publications. Her ever-evolving garden is an integral part of her artistic process, filled with plants chosen for their form, texture, and colour. These botanical elements not only inspire her but are frequently incorporated into her work.

Her practice has traditionally involved creating playful component pieces combined with found materials, resulting in sculptures inspired by creatures, birds, and plants. A notable development in her work is the creation of the “Carrier Beasts,” the first forms to emerge from her concept of a tribe of creatures. She spent considerable time sketching at the Pitt Rivers Museum, drawing inspiration from collections of primitive sculptures from around the world. Particularly drawn to the fetish collections and Inuit carvings, these influences are evident in the symbolic and structural aspects of her pieces.

Currently, her work is developing into larger-scale, semi-abstract, hand-built sculptural ceramic forms, emphasising the interplay of texture and structure. Notably, Shirley presented a new collection at Cambridge Contemporary Art, inspired by a journey to the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. She describes the experience as encountering a “very intimate valley landscape high up in the Moroccan Atlas Mountains. In spring, it is lush and green, with almond blossom and new growth emerging from darkened branches. In a glade down by the mountain river, there is a very special place that will always stay with me—a unique landscape with huge sculptural boulders mapping the river, set strong and heavy against the lightness of nature.”