Rago Auctions

Jennifer Lee was born in Scotland and studied ceramics and tapestry at Edinburgh College of Art in the late 1970s prior to conducting research on South-West Indian prehistoric ceramics and visiting contemporary West Coast pottery during an eight-month scholarship to the United States. In the early 1980s, she earned her Master in Ceramics at the Royal College of Art in London, eventually settling in the city where she remains living and working to this day.

Lee’s work is entirely hand-built, utilizing ancient techniques of pinching and coiling, and she colors her pieces by mixing metallic oxides into the clay before shaping it. Her materials and methods are central to her practice and the resulting works, as she explained in an interview: “My work is chiefly concerned with my interaction with the materials in my studio. The process is very important to me. Constant testing of materials is imperative to the ongoing development of my work.” Her innovative use of clay and oxides, and an absence of any sort of glaze, create subtle, distinctive haloes along the lines and shapes that weave around her forms and create a sense of movement, almost as if one is viewing a slice of the earth’s crust suspended in time.

In a career that now spans over forty years, Lee has exhibited internationally—including retrospectives at both the Röhsska Museet, Gothenburg (1993) and the Aberdeen Museum and Art Gallery, Scotland (1994)—and her work is represented in major public collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. She won the LOEWE Craft Prize in 2018 and was awarded an Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2021 for her service to ceramics. Lee’s dedication to her craft and her exceptional creations have cemented her place among the greatest British ceramic artists, alongside luminaries such as Lucie Rie, Hans Coper, and Bernard Leach.