Tea Party Exhibition at Utopia

9 Fish Hill, Holt NR25 6BD

The Tea Party exhibition is a celebration of artworks inspired by the English tradition of taking afternoon tea. Expect humour and surprise as each artist reveals their unique and delightful response in clay, textile and paint.

Exhibitors are: ceramicists Remon Jephcott, Ian Rylatt, Eluned Glyn, Alvin Irving, Katherine Kingdon and textile artist Fran Squires plus a collection of new oil paintings by Jac Scott.

Eluned Glyn

Eluned Glyn is a ceramic designer/maker, living and working in Cardiff, Wales. She exhibits widely around the UK and Europe. Her fine art background and interest in Cubism has led to her Minimus Maximus Collection. 

Pieces are created by using broken crockery to make faceted objects, which are cast in pottery plaster and then slip-cast in earthenware clay. The ghost-like simplicity of the collection reflects the redundancy of colour that are typically absent in modernist design. It is the marriage of form and function that intrigues her and the distortion of the domestic object which is familiar, yet foreign in form.

Remon Jephcott

The traditional afternoon tea, as popularised by Victorian women, provided a setting for intimate social engagement. Inspired by this ritual, Remon Jephcott finds that the teacup is imbued with femininity, revealing a relationship between gender and object: characteristics such as delicacy and fragility with a precious quality.

The respectability that was a moral necessity for Victorian women, was not always upheld within their society, which Remon has subtly referenced in her teacups.

Remon Jephcott has a ceramics studio in Truro, Cornwall where she creates her earthenware clay sculptures using crackle and barium glazes to echo age and decay followed by decals and lustre firings.

Ian Rylatt

Ian Rylatt is a ceramicist with a finely tuned sense of mathematical proportion and sculptural balance. His fascination with abstracting and manipulating the teapot form has won him national acclaim.

In 1988 Ian became a studio potter in Lincoln, moving onto Wales in 2004 where he has an established practice. Since 2010 he has been a member of the Makers Guild of Wales.

He hand throws and constructs his pots in stoneware, then fires them at 1260°- 80°c. He uses bespoke black/rust glazes including colouring oxides manganese and iron to create his distinctive style of ceramics.

Fran Squires

Fran Squires is an East Anglian storyteller who uses textiles, print making, drawing and salvaged remnants to tell her narratives. She works in a very organic way letting the stories unfold in a loose graphic style with painterly details. Drawn to patterns in the world around her, she transposes these into pictorial artworks that attract the eye and pique curiosity.

After studying Surface Pattern at university, she went on to work as a designer, then technician at Norwich University of the Arts. Fran is now a full-time artist devoting her time to exploring new ways to tell her stories.

Katherine Kingdon

Berkshire based ceramicist, Katherine Kingdon, tells stories in clay. Her pieces are imbued with humour and her surface imagery playfully pokes at your imagination.

"I like the way that form and surface speak of place and circumstance, how something simple and mundane has the power to evoke memories or spark the imagination and take our mind for a walk."

Katherine slab-builds each piece, then sets about populating the surface with finely rolled slivers of clay. She invents these into characters and stories, leaving an element of ambiguity for the viewer to play with.

Alvin F. Irving

Cumbrian based Alvin F. Irving creates statement ceramic teapots to use as a canvas for his pictorial narratives. He throws and constructs tableware in porcelain and white earthenware. The pieces are then painted with underglaze brushwork and gold lustre highlights.

Home Collection

New oil paintings by Jac Scott

The domestic space has long held a fascination with many artists. Whatever the medium, to transpose the enigmatic and the mundane of home, is an enduring focus. Often drawing our attention to the small and overlooked elements, these still life works form narratives on our way of living.

Here Scott is preoccupied with the celebration of the joy of home comforts and the reflection of her feelings that these simple objects bring. By painting atmospheric vignettes, she focusses our gaze on a few items that capture the essence of the subject.

Her own country home forms the canvas for this unique collection with her love of old crockery, antique books and flowers emanating throughout the paintings. The casual, contemporary format of the compositions, the painterly style of the brushwork and the saturated colour palette, create an inviting window into the artist's world.

"I want to create pictures that are colour baths to wallow in and to soak up the warmth. The cosy style should feel like a wall-based hug".

Home Collection

A Collection of Original Oil Paintings by Jac Scott.

An antidote to fast living.

The domestic space has long held a fascination with many artists. Whatever the medium, to transpose the enigmatic and the mundane of home, is an enduring focus. Often drawing our attention to the small and overlooked elements, these still life works form narratives on our way of living.

Here Scott is preoccupied with the celebration of the joy of home comforts and the reflection of her feelings that these simple objects bring. By painting atmospheric vignettes, she focusses our gaze on a few items that capture the essence of the subject.

Her own country home forms the canvas for this unique collection with her love of old crockery, antique books and flowers emanating throughout the paintings. The casual, contemporary format of the compositions, the painterly style of the brushwork and the saturated colour palette, create an inviting window into the artist's world.

"I want to create pictures that are colour baths to wallow in and to soak up the warmth. The cosy style should feel like a wall-based hug".

"I want to enjoy wobbly towers of pretty vintage teacups, rows of mis-matched tea plates, (maybe a butterfly has landed on one?) clusters of quirky old tea and coffee pots, worn squashy sofas, and stacks of well-read books."

The Home Collection is an evolving body of work, so expect nuances and surprises along the way.

1 May - 28 June 2025

Jon Bull's work has evolved over the years, but one thing that has remained consistent is his strong relationship with the wheel.  It has always been at the centre of his creativity and serves as the spring from which his process flows; a process he describes as "form, surface, colour".

A few years after graduating at the University of Wales Institute, Jon made the transition from production thrower to studio potter, when he set up his first workshop and began developing his own work.  Gradually he moved away from making functional pottery, finding himself drawn to the more expressive creation of ceramic art.

For two decades now, Jon has been exhibiting at galleries and ceramic fairs all over the UK and beyond. His fascination with abstracting celestial-scapes, shorelines, the ocean and the earth, inspires beguiling forms with highly textured surfaces. Jon creates his signature, highly tactile stoneware-fired clay forms by using volcanic and barium glazes.

Jon Bull 's ceramic studio is based near Cardiff, Wales.