“My main thing is making pots for eating, drinking and cooking. I like the way pots enter our lives somewhat stealthily, and benignly, and exert their quiet influence. As companions they offer beauty, comfort, practical service, sensuous experience all in a modest almost subliminal way.
My figurative ceramics or sculptures seem to work in a completely different way, there are few of the craft criteria of workmanship, functionality, beauty or proportion to be fulfilled. Freed from these constraints everything becomes more exploratory, open, more like play.”

These figures start from many different places. It might be a song (Tag Game), a person (Emily Dickinson), a poem (the Smile/Frown vases), a dream (Father’s Jacket), a comment on something. As a presence, something to hold flowers, something that beckons and baffles, or provokes a smile.
James Burnett-Stuart completed a degree in English Literature at Cambridge University before training in ceramics at Harrow College.
He set up his first studio in Ealing and then at Eel Pie Island,Twickenham where he made ranges of tableware for The Conran Shop, Designer’s Guild and Egg. He has held solo shows at The Scottish Gallery, Egg and Charleston Farmhouse. James was also Artist-in-Residence at Charleston.