Deirdre Burnett was born in India in 1939, setting in the UK in 1947, where she studied at St Martin's School Art and Camberwell. In the 1970s she became known for her delicate thrown and pinched porcelain and stoneware, her forms and marking recalling structures in the natural world, from organisms on the ocean bed to fungi found our woodland. It paralleled the precision and crispness of similar work by Peter Simpson, Mary Rogers and the other worldly fragility of Ruth Duckworth's smaller pieces.
More recently Burnett has concentrated on simpler bowl and cylinder forms with pitted, sometimes volcanic glazes, which show the influence of Lucie Rie, but are Burnett's own distinctive response to the landscape of modernism. She lives and works in London.
David Whiting |
