Of the five Julia Carter Peston exhibitions around Liverpool, each celebrating her life and work in different ways, it’s Bluecoat Display Centre that stands out for its representation of contemporary inspiration.
Each exhibition is a journey into the life of one of Liverpool’s best-known ceramicists, on the centenary of her birth, but here, there’s an opportunity to understand how and why she was and is held in such high regard by her peers; not just those who owned and collected her work.
It’s important to understand the magic of sgraffito first. It’s a simple technique of removing coloured slip coating from a clay base to create pattern, working in negative. The ancient technique was revived by the Arts and Crafts movement, but largely lost. When it was used, it was for decorative use. In post-war Britain, Julia Carter Preston managed to make the technique as much about touch as design. He work was intricate, and followed principles and forms of Arts and Crafts, but made the technique accessible, desirable and aspirational.
Today, contemporary artists use it as part of a whole, with deeper experimentation into initial slip work, drawing on more historic cultural influences to explore how slip pigment can evoke ancestry, or elevate objects to forms with new depths.
It often does a huge disservice to artists as influential as Julia Carter Preston to compare to modern work, where contemporary experiment, and access to materials and training is simply more possible, to focus on how much freer the present-day work is compared to their influences. But here, it doesn’t, because it’s centred in how those artists had a practice enabled by one experimental creator.
The expressive sgraffito illustrations of Chris Turrell directly references the techniques, but adds on, with glazes used to illustrate and highlight. Not dissimilar to the metallic glazes on Julia Carter Preston’s more prized works, but with more energy.
As with all of these centenary exhibitions, it has to be compact in how it tells these stories, but for the story of the materials, Bluecoat Display Centre is the one that grounds this artist in the present, and evidences why we continue to celebrate her work.
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Made From Scratch, Celebrating Julia Carter Preston, Ceramicist, is open at Bluecoat Display Centre until 7th November 2026
The rest of the programme is open at Victoria Gallery & Museum, Bluecoat, Walker Art Galllery and Liverpool Hope’s Cornerstone Gallery. Most are open until 7th November.
Words, Patrick Kirk-Smith
