Browse our full directory of Worcestershire-based artists and makers. Members who took part in Art Week 2025 are marked with a yellow venue number beneath their name and description. Members without a venue number are part of our organisation but did not taking part in Art Week 2025. We are launching our new 2026 membership and Art Week registration on 14th February. You can download the 2025 digital guide HERE.
John Hemmer
Art Forms
Ceramics & Pottery
Artist information
I spent the formative years of my life in the vicinity of Stoke-on-Trent, “The Potteries”, and I guess this is where my love of clay and the ceramic process was born too.
By the time I started my degree in Multidisciplinary Design I had worked for several years with a craftsman potter in the Staffordshire Peak District, taught pottery classes at the Gladstone Pottery Museum (home of the tv series The Great Pottery Throwdown) and participated in the last coal firing of a tradition bottle oven kiln.
Having completed my degree, specialising in hand-ceramics, and then a post-graduate teaching qualification, I subsequently spent 32 years teaching three-dimensional design and ceramics in further education. Alongside teaching I intermittently continued to make and exhibit my own ceramics as well as paintings.
Having left full-time teaching behind, built art studios for my wife and myself in the garden of our cottage, I now have more time to creatively pursue my love of clay.
Textures and surfaces have always been important to me in my work, as too has an experimental approach to materials and the making processes. My earlier work focused on sculptural forms and surfaces inspired by many visits to botanical gardens such as Kew and the ceramics of Robin Welch. Later work contrasted with this by considering the structures and surfaces of corroding machinery and metalwork – these often incorporated materials other than clay in the manner of ceramicists such as Gillian Lowndes.
My current ceramics seek to build on my previous work by reflecting my love of surface textures, pattern and forms evocative of the landscapes and environments that I travel through. My work uses coarse clays (crank), glazes mixed from raw ingredients, and traces of other materials reminiscent of the landscapes, such as wood ash, sands and clay soils. My work is fired to 1220° centigrade.
Ranging from functional forms to purely aesthetic pieces, free-standing and wall-mounted, the colours and surfaces evoke a sense of place rather than depicting any individual location.
I live and work on the side of the beautiful Teme Valley with expansive views toward Herefordshire and Shropshire. Here I share my life with my wife and Mabel our lovable Romanian rescue dog.