Artist
Pollyanna Johnson
Since graduating with a Masters from the Royal Drawing School, Pollyanna has been creating drawings, oil paintings, and ceramics. Her current works are primarily decorative ceramic pieces. Her work sells internationally and has been featured in House and Garden, Harper’s Bazaar, and Idler among others.
Her initial influences when she started working with ceramics were English delftware for its simple and decorative monochromatic designs. She enjoys the juxtaposition of 17th/18th-century female portraits on antique-shaped ceramics with humorous contemporary graphic phrases and slogans that mock the patriarchy and gender inequality in the art world.
Pollyanna's Style
Some of her pieces come from a place of disquiet, inspired by her and others experiences of sexism. Overall, however, she aims to poke fun at some of the absurdities of society, and having fun with paintings of women that she loves.
She is often inspired to make a ceramic piece after seeing a particular shape or design in a museum collection like the V&A, or in an antique shop. She then reinterprets this in her own style in clay. In the time it takes to make, dry and fire the piece to bisqueware she then decides what she wants to paint on it. She uses white clay and slip with bright underglaze colours, and a transparent glaze to gain the texture and finish desired for her pieces.
Read A Maker’s Story: saints, sexism, rebels and relics in the subversive ceramics of Pollyanna Johnson and Joseph Dupré on Inigo
"I am a painter using ceramics as my canvas, creating beautiful objects inspired by women from art history. I promote these women to the centre of attention, transporting them from the dusty backgrounds of paintings by Old Masters..." - Pollyanna Johnson