Potter Helen Beard's porcelain
Quirky characters and scenes are nectar to potter Helen Beard, who draws them on her porcelain beakers, mugs and bowls
Quirky characters and scenes are nectar to potter Helen Beard, who draws them on her porcelain beakers, mugs and bowls
High above the hubbub of London’s Clerkenwell, two minutes from Smithfield market, potter Helen Beard is at work. Part of the artistic community at Craft Central on St John’s Square, her third-storey studio has bird’s eye views over streets and rooftops. The whitewashed walls and pale blue rubber flooring impart a calm, light and spacious feeling.
‘When you’re wedging and throwing up to six kilos of clay you’re putting your whole body into it. When I don’t do it I feel tense,’ she remarks.
Today she has been at work since 8am and won’t go home until 7pm. ‘I like to come up with new ideas for every show that I do, and this project has a rural theme so I’ve been decorating with birds, flowers and cows inspired by the Derbyshire countryside where my parents live.’
Original touch
It’s this passion for the new that has driven Helen’s success. Since finishing an apprenticeship with leading potter Edmund de Waal in 2004, Helen’s trajectory has been stellar. A 2005 Crafts Council development award ‘paid for the kiln’, and in 2007 she won the Evening Standard Homes & Property award for best domestic design. She has pieces in the permanent collections of the City of Edinburgh Museums & Galleries Trust and Hove Museum & Art Gallery. This year she exhibited at the premier applied arts selling show, ‘Collect’ at the V&A, with the Joanna Bird Gallery, which then took her to the top American crafts show, ‘SOFA’ in Chicago.
As a teenager she ‘was always drawing’, and honed her style on walking holidays in Cornwall where she sketched scenes at Mousehole, Zennor and St Ives. A great inspiration was and is the Cornish artist Alfred Wallis, who didn’t start painting until he was 70, after a life at sea. ‘As a child, I had a poster of one of his paintings and I connected with his naïve style straightaway.’
‘They were two patterned pieces, laced together,’ says Helen. After nine months reality struck and she realised that while the dresses were original, they weren’t very saleable. She changed tack. A new direction Though lucky enough to be offered an apprenticeship with de Waal, she was daunted at first. ‘I had never thrown a pot in my life,’ she recalls. ‘At that time Edmund shared a studio with another leading ceramicist, Julian Stair. Their work was very minimalist and pure, in white, celadon and grey porcelain, whereas I couldn’t resist drawing on my pots and giving them a bit of humour!’ At Edmund’s studio she learnt to throw and to glaze, with Edmund spending snips of time with her whenever he could.
Since setting up on her own in 2004 Helen’s style has evolved further. Drawings of bobbing boats were one of her first motifs, and have remained her ‘bread and butter work’, sold through several Cornish galleries. In early 2005, another artist told her about the Serpentine swimmers and, intrigued, Helen went and observed their swimming rituals in London’s Hyde Park. They were subsequently among the first ‘characters’ she drew on pots, and marked a new strength of colour and line in her work.

The rise of Helen Beard
020 8995 9960; joannabirdpottery.com
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