Rachel Wood is a contemporary ceramic artist with an extensive international reputation for her work in the UK and overseas. A rare combination of arts administration experience and knowledge of modern languages provided an invaluable radar to steer Rachel’s creative growth, which now extends to over 15 years of exhibiting and residential teaching at ceramic schools in Europe and the UK (including Denmark, Germany, Italy, Austria, Switzerland and Australia). Rachel is the only English winner of the major ceramic awards in Germany – the coveted Neue Keramik award in 2016, and the Diessen Ceramic prize (sponsored by Rohde Kilns) in 2017. Such success was followed by a 3 month residency at Sturt Craft Centre, New South Wales, Australia, to create new work for a solo show there in 2019.

Rachel’s ceramics radiate a sense of nature and place from her observations whilst hiking in such diverse landscapes of our local Derbyshire, to bushwalks in the wild and evocative Australian bush. The tactile trace of her individual touch is one of the guiding elements of her making process – imprints of fingers in the glaze, joins, rips and other distortions leave clues as to the building technique, whether it be handbuilding or throwing. A lengthy intuitive process carefully nurtures her works to life, and so compels the viewer to their mysterious and hidden depths.