About
Born in Bristol, Julian Stair is one of the UK’s leading ceramicists and potters. His work with clay centres around a recognition of the social and material importance of the pot, as well as its cross-cultural presence in human history. His works very often mark a quiet and powerful seizure of space, re-contextualising domestic and familiar forms. Julian has also gone on to create ceramic works of art, that commemorate and memorialise the body after death, through making funerary ware, cinerary jars and monumental life-size sarcophagi, he poses an arresting and contemporary take on enduring and truly universal subjects such as life and death.
Julian Stair studied at Camberwell School of Art and the RCA. He has has work in over thirty public collections including the V&A Museum, British Museum, American Museum of Art & Design, New York, Mashiko Museum of Ceramic Art, Japan, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Kolumba Museum, Cologne, Grassi Museum, Leipzig, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Julian completed a PhD at the RCA in 2002 on the critical history of English pottery; his essays have been published by Routledge, Bloomsbury, the Courtauld Institute, Tate Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art. Julian was awarded an OBE in 2022 for his services to ceramics.
Recent solo exhibitions include Art, Death and the Afterlife, Sainsbury Centre, Norwich 2023, Equivalenze, Fondazione ICA Milano, Milan 2019, Equivalence, Corvi-Mora Gallery, London 2018, Quotidian, Corvi-Mora Gallery, London 2014-15 and Quietus: The Vessel, Death and the Human Body, MIMA, National Museum Wales Cardiff, Winchester Cathedral, Somerset House, London 2012-14, Manchester Cathedral 2016.
