'Garniture' exhibition at Croome

Amy Jayne Hughes, a London-based ceramicist has been granted funding from the Arts Council to produce a new installation at Croome.  Amy's work is now on display in the Saloon in the Court.

The project focusses on colour extraction; a deconstruction of a Royal Worcester Porcelain piece according to ground colours identified in the hand painted decoration.

Working from her London studio, Amy has built a series of vases, individually decorating each wholly with one colour, connecting the past and the present in a modern interpretation.

Inspired by colourful and rare pieces collected by the Coventry family in the 18th and 19th centuries, Hughes has focused on the use of colour in a single piece, chosen by staff and volunteers earlier this year.

Contemporary ceramicist, Amy Jayne Hughes, submitted her bid to the Arts Council in 2017 to create a new work which was then approved in early 2018.

The project seeks to highlight and celebrate the internationally important ceramic collection that has recently returned to public display at Croome, showing its continuing relevance today. It aims to engage and excite visitors, promoting the practice of ceramics, demonstrating new and innovative ways of working and the use of colour. 

Hughes has created 29 individual wares (porcelain coil pots made in her studio) and has glazed each with one colour, extracted from a Royal Worcester Ice Pail (on display in the Golden Box). The end result is a ceramic landscape set in the Saloon overlooking the ‘Capability’ Brown landscape park.

The exhibition will run until the end of November 2019

Originally from West Yorkshire, Amy lives and works in London. She shares a studio with 10 of her former classmates from the Royal College of Art, known as Manifold.

Hughes has worked and exhibited internationally, including a spell as Artist in Residence at Konstfack School, Stockholm, Sweden. She was nominated to represent the UK in ‘New Talent’ at the European Ceramic Context 2014 as well as being selected for the inaugural Young Masters Maylis Grand Ceramics Prize 2014 for artists who show an exceptional command of ceramics, alongside an awareness of the heritage of ceramic craft. In 2015, Amy was chosen as the first Ceramics and Industry Artist in Residence at the Victoria & Albert Museum and selected as one of eleven artists for AWARD at the British Ceramics Biennial.

Amy was nominated for the fourth Perrier-Jouët Arts Salon Prize in 2016. In 2018 Amy exhibited her work at the V&A as part of the London Design Festival. Garniture at Croome is her first solo show.