LINDA STYLES

Linda Styles is an artist whose passion for colour, form, and the uncensored expression of female energy is at the heart of all her work.”

Linda Styles is one of the UK’s foremost artist potters. She studied Studio Pottery at Falmouth College of Art, and as an undergraduate was selected for Ceramic Contemporaries II exhibition at the V&A London, the Setting Out exhibition at the CPA, and was commissioned by Sir Terence Conran to create an exclusive tableware collection as part of the collaboration Styles and Ward.

She has directed Arts Council, Heritage Lottery and EU Funded public art projects, and lectures by invitation on the subjects of ceramics and contemporary craft. Her work is available at a select list of galleries in the UK.

Artist's CV

Linda Styles is an artist whose passion for colour, form, and the uncensored expression of female energy is at the heart of all her work. Love, devotion, heartbreak, loss, joy, rage, dark humour and an outright irreverence for creative or emotional boundaries of any kind are evident in the expressionist nature of her mark making, the vibrancy of her glazes, and the impulsive, almost wayward shaping of each clay object. As a maker, she describes herself loosely as an ‘art potter’ or ‘assemblage artist’ with a particular affection for Beat culture and low-grade mid-century ornamentation: as a woman, she describes herself as ‘high church indoctrinated to the point of rebellion’, a little girl grown to womanhood against a divisive backdrop of 50s nostalgia and 60s nuclear family living, saved by the emotional order she learned to achieve through the curation and placement of ‘divine objects’.

Her unique experiences as a woman, mother and working artist, and an awareness of her female ancestry, including a grandmother who tailored waistcoats for King George V, are crucial to the ideas and passions that imbue her work. Curved edges, soft or even slumped shapes and open vessel forms are suggestive of the feminine in a physical sense, while floods of jewel-like colour, touches of real gold and a passionate, sometimes furious approach to mark making reflect the emotional detail any woman engaged in the realities of human experience will acquire over her lifetime.

Deeming the theory and politics of contemporary art irrelevant to her practice, Linda regards herself as a ‘do-er’, simply a maker of wonderful, mischievous things, but at the same time the artist’s own lifetime is intrinsic to the meaning of her work, in the way that pottery has always recorded the ever changing course of civilization, from ancient Goddess Culture to the challenges of modern womanhood.