Best Friends Exhibition

1 November - 31 December 2025

What is a best friend? 

Someone or something you can rely on? We invited 8 artists to respond to the brief and the outcomes are wide ranging and engaging with wit, delight, enchantment and sentiment.

We are pleased to say that charm and joy pervade the exhibition - which is exactly its intent. You can discover not only cats and dogs but also horses, donkeys, birds, an anteater, an okapi and many more. Each sculpture is beautifully crafted in form and material.

All the exhibits are for immediate sale, but be aware that we sell from the wall, so hurry.

Ceramicist Helen Higgins

Helen Higgins is a prize winning ceramicist, nationally renowned for her humorous ceramics. Her pieces are individually hand built employing slab, coil, pinch and modelling techniques, to create her characters. She loves dressing her animals up in costumes - creating animal hybrids with anthropomorphic vibes. 

“I endeavour to explore how we sometimes try to hide our true selves behind a façade, masking our own vulnerabilities by pretending or taking on other characteristics, with the intention of increasing self-esteem and confidence."

Her busy studio and teaching practice is based in south Wales.

Figurative Ceramicist Jean Tolkovosky

Surrey based ceramicist Jean Tolkovsky, is a nationally renowned sculptor specialising in figurative work. Her sculptures are each unique pieces inspired by myths, novels and childhood memories. The dream-like quality of her work is achieved not only in the form, but also in the sensitive rendering of the glazes and mark making.

Jean's masked and anthropomorphic figures reveal a fascination and intrigue to the multiple facets of the human persona.  Her aim is to suggest the narrative, whilst leaving a space for further contemplation by the viewer.

Jean Tolkovsky's sculptures are collected around the world.

Mixed-Media Artist Gemma Rees 

Gemma Rees is a Sussex based artist specialising in creating highly textured canine sculptures.

After a career as a professional graphic designer, she experimented with 3D materials and from there her passion for making animal sculptures grew. Her specialism is dogs and how their quirky characters evolve through the process of doing a drawing, making a wire armature and then working with paper clay and resin to create the surface. Some sculptures are very labour intensive, taking weeks to build. Her aim is not to shape a realistic canine, but instead interpret its personality through the materials and gestural form.

Wildlife Ceramicist Elaine Peto

Elaine Peto has spent a lifetime being inspired by the natural world. From her studio in Hampshire she studies animal behaviour, their forms and characteristics. Elaine's portfolio includes ceramic sculptures of farm and wild animals and even sea creatures. She specialises in creating one-off pieces using textured stoneware and porcelain clay.

“ My aim is to capture the essence of the beast”

Animal Ceramicist Joanne Cooke

Yorkshire based, Joanne Cooke has spent the last 25 years sharing her love of animals by creating life-like ceramic sculptures. Her primary fascination is with dogs and their captivating characters and playful natures. Each pose and facial expression is carefully worked in clay until it conveys the essence of the animal.

Joanne individually sculpts each dog out of stoneware clay, then decorates them with a combination of matt underglaze and shiny top glaze.

Ceramicist Emma Rowley

Yorkshire based ceramicist, Emily Rowley, creates charming sculptures that aim to make you smile. Through building the form in stoneware clay she imbues character by the application of textures and pattern. Each piece is a delightful statement that brings humour and cheer.

"The ceramics I make, through pattern and personality, evoke feelings of nostalgia and cosiness. They comfort you like an old friend coming round for a cuppa".

Ceramicist Christy Keeney

Internationally renowned sculptor, Christy Keeney, studied ceramics at the Royal College of Art in London. After spending 17 years in London, Christy returned to his native Donegal where he now lives and works with his family.

His sculptures have a strong narrative quality that invites you to contemplate the story behind the work.  He sculpts and draws into slabs of wet clay creating heads and disjointed figures that investigate the human condition.

His forms often extend to the point where sculpture and drawing meld.  He uses washes of colour to denote mood and atmosphere, whilst sometimes opting for a monochromatic palette to heighten the form's impact.

Miniaturist Ceramicist Andrew Bull

Kent based sculptor Andrew Bull specialises in making quirky porcelain miniatures. His light-hearted approach captures the essence of humour in everyday situations: whether walking the dog or hanging out the washing. Each animated character tells a story that engages and delights. For Andrew, a best friend doesn't have to be an animal or person, it can also be a car or a bag of golf clubs - always there when you need it!

Andrew uses rolled and slab building techniques to carefully create each sculpture by hand, adding lustres and enamels to highlight key accents.

Awakenings

Wild Iceland - A Journey of Discovery

3 October - 29 November 2025

Jillian Riley is an artist who uses a ceramic canvas to illustrate her journey's: creative, geographical and personal. Visits to Iceland have informed this new collection of work where the magic and wonder of the wilderness have inspired intriguing forms featuring haunting drawings and dramatic glazes.

"From a love of corvids, flora and fauna, mixed with a passion for the wild landscapes of Iceland I have been inspired to create collections of apothecary vessels and sculptures in porcelain and parian clay."

"Iceland is not only an incredibly beautiful, ever-changing wilderness, but it also a place that gives you time to breathe, think and live in the moment."

Jillian Riley is a designer and ceramicist working from her studio in Derbyshire.

After working for many years as a commercial designer, she explored ceramics and found the medium that could combine her love of drawing with a malleable 3D surface.

Paula Rylat is an esteemed American glass artist living in West Wales. We are proud that she has selected Utopia as the gallery to have her last solo exhibition before retiring.

Rylatt's intense studies of nature create dynamic responses capturing the energy and movement of the observed. She is particularly inspired by the contrasts of change within constancy of trees and the sea. Her chosen material is clear, fused glass as it evokes the solid, yet ethereal qualities of her subject.

Crest

"There is something of those dynamics in my use of clear, fused glass; a solid material that looks like it will melt away, a ghost image of a place that allows the 'here and now' to be seen through it."

“I live a quiet and simple life in the hills of mid-coast Wales, and my work reflects that. I am particularly (but not solely) inspired by trees and the sea, which appear to have very different dynamics but which contain similar contrasts. Trees seem so constant, solid and still; silent witnesses, yet they are always moving, in growth or death or in response to their environment. The sea on the other hand appears to be in constant motion and change, slippery churning, but from an airplane waves breaking on a beach don't appear to move at all. They look frozen. The sea level turmoil is just energy passing through a fluid mass.

"There is something of those dynamics in my use of clear, fused glass; a solid material that looks like it will melt away, a ghost image of a place that allows the 'here and now' to be seen through it."

Coastal Wind

There Was a Time When

Glass interactive installation and poem