Product Details

Mixed Media by Susan Halls

Unframed Size Approx: 27.7 x 41.2cm (10.9 x 16.2 inches)

Framed Size Approx: 37.7 x 51.2cm (14.8 x 20.2 inches)

Date of Artwork: 2025

FRAME CHOICES: Oak with mount, Putty wood with mount, White wood with mount, Black wood with mount

Please note: Our framers are recognised by the Fine Art Trade Guild for their quality because the custom frames have tightly pinned corners, and are made from precision cut wood in England, made bespoke for each order. All our frames are glazed with our Clarity+ Perspex. It's cut from the highest quality acrylic sheet that's both crystal clear, but also safe and filters out 99% of UV light to protect the artwork.
Read more about our FRAMING WORKSHOP here

STORY

Hot off the heels from an outstanding solo exhibition at the Ruthin Craft Centre last year, we eagerly commissioned Susan Halls to create a new collection of her celebrated hand built ceramic cats for The Shop Floor Project.

(Image copyright of Shannon Tofts)

The solo show at Ruthin was a spectacular sight and a highlight of the artist's almost 40 years of practice. The curators gave over the entirety of the Ruthin Craft Centre's exhibition spaces to Halls' work, a rare honour which has only happened three times in Ruthin's history.

Susan Halls' work is represented in several public collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, The Centre of Ceramic Art in York and the Museum of Contemporary Ceramic Art in Japan. It has also just been announced that Halls is one of the ten selected artists to exhibit new work for the headline exhibition at the 2025 British Ceramics Biennial.

(Image copyright of Shannon Tofts)

Though an accomplished ceramicist, Halls is not driven by technique. She uses the full spectrum of ceramic processes as she needs, effortlessly switching from hand building to wheel throwing, majolica painting to sgraffito, raku to stoneware firing, all to bring her drawings to life in clay.

Susan is part of an exciting lineage of British figurative sculptors; from 20th century artists such as Elizabeth Frink, to contemporaries such as Nicola Hicks. It's a rich and exciting group of artists who are recognised and celebrated for their work using raw materials in a visceral way, along with an unapologetic use of scale.

(Hand built form, underglaze painting in Susan Halls' studio, Cornwall, 2025)

A primitive, animalistic energy bursts from Halls' work, and there is an ongoing search, within the making and use of the material, to explore animal behaviour. "My work has always sought the form and feeling rather than the mere appearance of things. I'm trying to create a sculpture which traps a kind of animal truth." This likens Halls, as Philip Hughes director of Ruthin Craft Centre writes, to 'a vixen on the prowl, determined and persistent in her quest.'

Susan Halls' MA tutor at the Royal College of Art, Alison Britton, recalls how prolific Susan was as a student. Working well up to the 10pm cut-off time in the studios, drawing and sketching, making, building. She recalls that Susan had quietly kept a very cooperative, and happy, pet rabbit in a small hut under her desk in order to draw it often from life.

Drawing from life is essential to Susan Halls, and means frequent trips to farmyards and zoos. However, for this collection, the artist hasn't needed to travel far from her studio in Cornwall. These new, substantial works draw upon the artist's muse and pet, Mussels the tabby cat.

Almost life-size, these hand-built sculptures are a celebration of the material as much as the subject. The way Susan Halls animates through clay is extraordinary, and the painterly glazes of the different fur patterns have the same delicious energy as the tactile hand-built nature of the clay.

(Above: Glaze tests in the Susan Halls' studio, Cornwall, 2025)

Alert and ready to prowl, there is an unnerving sensation that each cat could move at any moment, as if they have wandered in through the window, bathing in the sunlight, before they move again.

As Jonathan Glancy (former architecture and design editor at The Guardian) wrote, Susan Halls' ceramics are the 'equivalent of Ted Hughes poetry: dark, broody, elemental'. 

(Image from one of the first articles written about Susan Halls, The Independent in 1990 covering her RCA graduate collection, showing an enormous sculpture of a partial head of a Hare)

Born in 1966 in Kent, England, Susan studied studio ceramics at her local art school, the Medway College of Art and Design from 1984-1988. During this time she was awarded a scholarship by the Royal College of Art in London.

She graduated MA with distinction in 1990. Her first studios were in London followed by a twenty year period of living and working in the USA. In 2018 she returned to live in the UK. In 2024 'Biting Back' was her first major solo exhibition since her return. In 2025 Susan became one of the ten selected artists to exhibit new work for the headline exhibition at the 2025 British Ceramics Biennial.