Felicity Aylieff

Born Bedfordshire, England 1954

Felicity Aylieff’s work provokes an immediate sense of awe, both through its monumental scale and the expressive, yet considered, handling of surface decoration. Deeply-rooted within a context of traditional Chinese ceramic-making, yet immediately contemporary, her work can be found in some of the UK’s most prestigious public collections.

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Working in Bath and China

1975-1977   Bath Academy of Art, Bath, BA Hons Three-Dimensional Design
1978             Goldsmiths College, London, ATC Postgraduate Teaching Course
1993-1996   Royal College of Art, London, M Phil Postgraduate Research, Ceramics

Felicity Aylieff is one of the UK’s most innovative contemporary artists working in clay. She established her reputation as a maker of large-scale, sculptural ceramics at the Royal College of Art in 1996. Ten years on, an ‘incredibly liberating’ artist residency in Jingdezhen, China, the historic home of Chinese porcelain production, saw the beginning of a series of monumental pots, the largest of which stands three metres high. Returning each summer since then Felicity has developed the surface decoration of the pots with printed, stylised drawings of plants and flowers or colourful clouds of exquisite, exotic butterflies.

The strong relationships developed with porcelain factories have enabled Aylieff to work in an unprecedented way and the knowledge and expertise gained from this rich cultural exchange have offered her limitless inspiration. Her work reflects her confidence when drawing-on and reinterpreting traditional Chinese techniques of porcelain production and decoration.

Felicity has taught Ceramics & Glass at the Royal College of Art for over fifteen years.

Felicity Aylieff has work in the following public collections: 

Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, Birmingham
Contemporary Art Society, London
Devonshire Collections, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire
National Museum Cardiff, Wales
Prior’s Court School, Berkshire
Shipley Art Gallery, Gateshead, Tyne & Wear
The Wilson Arts Gallery and Museum, Cheltenham
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
York Art Gallery, Yorkshire
Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt, Germany
Keramikmuseum Westerwald, Höhr-Grenzhausen, Germany
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Icheon World Ceramic Centre, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea
Auckland Museum, Auckland, New Zealand