Donald Locke (1930 - 2010) was a versatile and complex artist who enjoyed experimenting in a variety of media. Born in Guyana, Locke studied ceramics at Bath Academy of Art, Corsham, where his teachers included some of Britain's leading avant garde painters and sculptors. Influenced by James Tower, he evolved an essentially sculptural approach to clay. He eventually settled in Atlanta, USA.

His original bottle forms, sometimes austerely black, sometimes a canvas for his lively narrative drawing, showed an obvious debt to his Guyana roots, but also a strong connection to the expressive freedom and marking of post war art and the ceramics produced by Picasso, for example, and some of the innovative potters working in America. Some of his sparer more concentrated pieces had biomorphic elements, abstract often bisected 'twin' forms alluding to the figure and other structures. Locke was philosophically and stylistically an internationalist, whose work reflected his rich and varied cultural experience.

David Whiting