Heather Gibson: Surfacing is on view at County Hall Pottery, London
August 12 – September 7, 2025
Surfacing, a solo exhibition by ceramic artist Heather Gibson, explores these themes through a striking new body of work developed during her year-long residency at County Hall Pottery. The exhibition marks Gibson’s debut as County Hall Pottery’s first Potter in Residence and features a collection of hand-built, gas-reduced ceramic stoneware, including large sculptural pieces, vessels, and wall-based works.
“My work is an assemblage of time. Through layering slips, glazes, and marks, I build up multi-dimensional surfaces. My method embraces the unpredictability of materials – allowing the clay to give something back, something beyond our control.”
Developed on-site at County Hall – a historic building steeped in its own layers of narrative – each piece has been made and fired by the artist using County Hall Pottery’s gas and electric kilns. This unique environment has deeply shaped the work on display, grounding it in place as much as process.
Central to Surfacing is Gibson’s experimental approach to reduction firing, a technique she began refining during her MA at the Royal College of Art. Using the large gas kiln on site at County Hall, she creates dynamic, flowing surfaces that echo geological transformation. “My technique is about layering time,” she says, “through marks, gesture, flow and, ultimately, letting the kiln complete the narrative.”
The exhibition is inspired in part by the weathered pottery shards that appear along the banks of the River Thames – fragments of history revealed by the shifting tide. Drawing on these discoveries, Gibson reinterprets elements such as foot rings and lips of old pots, abstracting their forms and reanimating their presence through painterly, textured surfaces.
“To work with clay is to converse with time. These are not mere surfaces but temporal landscapes, palimpsestic assemblies of debris and matter, the collective accumulation of past impressions and the memory of forgotten forms.”
Through alchemical transformation – heat, fire, gravity, and friction – Gibson’s ceramics chart an elemental journey. “I want to reveal the intrinsic energy of materials,” she says. “My work seeks to bridge the gap between art and the everyday object, the past and the present, the material and immaterial world.”
Surfacing is a powerful meditation on how the past continues to emerge in the present, inviting viewers to look beyond surface and form – to witness memory made material.
About Heather Gibson
Heather Gibson is a London based ceramic artist whose practice centres on handbuilt forms, experimental surfaces and atmospheric firing. Her work explores material memory, often blurring the line between sculpture and vessel.
A recent graduate of the Royal College of Art (2024), Heather was awarded the Marit Rausing Scholarship for Ceramics & Glass. She also holds a degree in Photography from Nottingham Trent University, a background that continues to inform her research into trace, memory and mark-making. Her ceramics have been exhibited across the UK, including Thrown Gallery and The Leach Pottery.
About County Hall Pottery
County Hall Pottery is a groundbreaking initiative brought about to transform London’s historic County Hall into a vibrant ceramics destination. Located on London’s South Bank overlooking the River Thames, The Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, County Hall Pottery marks a new chapter in the revitalisation of this historic site.
With a vision to celebrate and support the art of pottery in all its forms, the organisation – which has been funded by County Hall Arts, and which is managed by ceramicist, Emma Louise Payne, and ceramic artist and teacher, Alex Simpson – provides a dynamic range of offerings including rotating exhibitions, pop-up markets, community engagement initiatives and a ‘potter in residence’ programme.
Contact
gallery@countyhallpottery.com
County Hall Pottery
County Hall, Belvedere Road
SE1 7GP London
United Kingdom
Photos courtesy of the gallery
