Lucy Ballard

Growing up in Oxford, I was introduced to the pottery wheel in a very ceramics-forward art department at secondary school. After a BSc in Archaeological Conservation, I went on to study at the Royal College of Music, and pursued a wide and varied career as a professional singer.

I moved back to Oxford in 2009. The intervening years had involved much making in a range of media- textiles, knitting, crochet, papier-mâché, culminating in an installation of a flock of wire and textile birds in a barn in France.

In 2017, I stumbled across the opportunity to be an intern in a local pottery, and I spent a happy term working in Katie Coston’s Illyria shop and studio, helping with all parts of the process from wedging to selling in the shop, and coming back to my first love, clay. This encouraged me to join a community studio, and from there, via a few intensive courses, to start my own pottery at home.

I make mostly thrown functional work in stoneware clay. My work is brightly coloured, strongly marked. I love the contrast between the variability of oxide colours and the more predictable commercial stains that I use. The liveliness of brushstrokes.

I am very moved by the idea of making vessels that will be handled with confidence and used with joy throughout the day. Mugs that fit the hand and purpose, bowls that ornament the food contained.

Recently I have expanded into more sculptural hand built work, and I was commissioned in 2024 to make a group of figures for a nativity scene for New College Chapel. This pulled together several threads in my life as I have followed my husband and two sons in being members of the chapel choir.