RAMP - Roop & Al Make Pots

RAMP – (Roop & Al Make Pots) is a creative collaboration between Rupert Johnstone & Alice Hartford. We make functional and decorative Earthenware and Porcelain studio ceramics. We met at Edinburgh College of Art in the late 1990’s. We began working together in 2001 at Cockpit Arts in Deptford, London at first as an experiment to see what things we could make together and quite quickly that evolved into something more definite. As with any collaboration, there is a process of interplay of ideas, each of us sharing thoughts and ideas about our practice and the pots we make. This is a really valuable process for both of us and the work we make together. In 2004 we moved to Devon, initially to a studio at the Beaford Arts Centre and then to our house and workshop in Silverton. We have been there until this summer, when we moved to a new purpose-built studio outside the village. Roop - I enjoy the tactile quality of clay and I have always liked the immediacy of throwing and the rhythms of making. I have a liking for simple, clean forms as they make good platforms for Alice’s decoration. Alice - My approach to painting the pots has evolved over the years that Roop and I have been working together. Inspiration comes from the natural world and, in turn, this is abstracted into various patterns and motifs found on the pots. I mostly use coloured slips to paint with and these are built up in layers using different brushstrokes when the pots are still wet. This allows for a certain fluidity and a sense of movement within the designs. I like to treat all the pots individually, working on them like drawings.