About
Stephen Dixon is Professor Emeritus in Contemporary Crafts at Manchester School of Art and lives and works in Manchester. His work is represented in major museums and collections in the UK and the USA, including The Victoria and Albert Museum, Museum of Arts and Design New York, Everson Museum New York, Liverpool Museums and Manchester Art Gallery.
His work focusses on contemporary social and political issues through the medium of figurative and narrative ceramics. The political nature of his practice has been recognised nationally and internationally. 21 Countries, developed for Imperial War Museum North, focussed on the war on Iraq in 2003 and is now in the collection of the Museum of Arts and Design, New York. In 2009 he was awarded the first ceramic residency at the V&A, resulting in the Restoration Series, three composite ceramic portraits based on Nobel Peace Prize winners and prisoners of conscience.
An Arts Council DYCP award in 2020 initiated a new body of work, Maiolica and Migration, which examined the issue of refugees and asylum seekers, comparing the contemporary journey of migrants across the Mediterranean and into Europe with the historic ‘migration’ of white tin-glazed earthenware. His installation The Ship of Dreams and Nightmares took the form of a Mediterranean refugee boat, representing refugees’ experiences of the nightmare of conflict and displacement and the dream of refuge in a place of safety. It won the prestigious British Ceramics Biennial AWARD in 2021, and the commission for Istoriato at BCB 2023. This tiled altarpiece combined traditional tin-glazed ceramic with digital transfer printing technology to explore the conjoined trajectories of people, objects, techniques and conflicts across the Mediterranean region.
