Rosa Nguyen is an artist of French Vietnamese parentage born in London. She gained a BA in 3D Design at Middlesex Polytechnic, specializing in ceramics and glass blowing, and an MA in ceramics from the Royal College of Art in 1986. She taught in numerous British art schools for 25 years, including on the celebrated Ceramic BA Hons course at Camberwell in London between 1996 – 2010. She currently lives and works between London and the southwest of France, where she has established a studio and a garden from which she sources the vegetal material she works with.
Her work has been supported by the Daiwa Anglo-Japan Foundation, Crafts Council, British Council and the Arts Council of England for her collaborative installations with Ikebana artists in Tokyo and London, ‘Living wall’ installation for Collect project Space at Saatchi gallery, London; Installation ‘Tree Folly with a Cercis’ at the Garden Museum, London; commissioned installation ‘Gardening with Morris’ for exhibition Arts and Crafts Then and Now at Compton Verney and her solo show ‘Sanctuary’ at Touchstone gallery for the Manchester Asia Triennial. Rosa was awarded 1st prize for the John Ruskin Art Prize in 2017.
She exhibits at home and abroad, and her work is represented in public collections in the UK, Europe, China, and Japan, including the GOSH Arts, Garden Museum collection, Touchstones Gallery, Shigeraki Museum, Aberdeen Museum and Gallery, Crafts Council collection, and Anthony Shaw collection at COCA.
Visit Rosa Nguyen’s website and Instagram page.
Featured work
Selected works, 2018-2025
Celestial bodies, 2024
Rosa makes ceramic and glass sculptural objects, vessels, drawings, and installations in the form of poetical compositional tableaux. Taking inspiration from the natural world and our holistic relationship with it, her work is characterized by organic and abstracted vessel forms and the incorporation of both living and dried botanical matter. These are assembled and manipulated through casting and preserving in both fired and clay gesso, given new life through dipping in liquid porcelain and sacrificial kiln firings which fuse and transform the combusted vegetal matter into richly glazed strange otherworldly hybrid forms.
With a long-standing interest in Animist and Oriental philosophies and taking inspiration from discrete arts such as gardening, the Japanese art of Ikebana flower arranging, astronomy, and traditional Chinese medicine – Rosa’s work evokes a contemplative aesthetic and a deep-rooted spiritual connection with nature. Her work often alludes to the invisible body, the transience between life and death, while celebrating the entangled interconnectivity between all life forms and forces.
