From sustainability to collecting, this year’s talks programme at Ceramic Art London at Olympia, which takes place from Friday 8 May to Sunday 10 May 2026, covers a wide range of subjects and artists. All talks are included in the ticket price and are offered on a first come, first served basis.
The fair is curated by the Craft Potters Association and has an extraordinary range of work on sale, priced from £30 to over £10,000 for collectors’ pieces. 125 independent makers were chosen through a rigorous selection process to exhibit at this year’s fair, with artists travelling to London from across Europe, and as far afield as Japan, Korea, Canada and the USA.
Felicity Aylieff is the Craft Potters Association keynote speaker at this year’s Ceramic Art London with her talk at 1.30pm on Friday 8th May, titled: The China Affair: Porcelain, Practice, Place. Internationally renowned, she is recognised for her innovation in large-scale ceramics. Recent exhibitions include Kew Gardens and Yorkshire Sculpture Park, with a forthcoming exhibition at Petworth House in West Sussex. In this talk she reflects on over two decades of working in Jingdezhen, exploring how these collaborations have shaped her distinctive ceramic language.
Pioneering ceramicist Kate Malone joins visionary fashion and textile designer Dame Zandra Rhodes for a vibrant exchange discussing From Clay to Catwalk,
exploring their shared passion for ceramics on Saturday 9th May at 1.30pm. Malone talks as a celebrated maker and Rhodes as a devoted collector. Together they will delve into their respective handcrafted practices of ceramics and screen-printing, exploring the role of colour, pattern and form.
William Cobbing will be talking about the video, Inner Horizon, Wild Clay Adventures in Utah, made in 2025, for his solo exhibition at Utah Museum of Contemporary Art at 3pm on Saturday 9th May. Travelling across Utah state, from the Great Salt Lake in the north to Green River in the south, he made a series of site-specific sculptural interventions and performances with clay in the landscape.
The Leach Pottery is currently undergoing the biggest changes onsite since it was set up in 1920. Libby Buckley has been Director of the Leach Pottery since 2016, leading its transformation into a thriving cultural hub for training, making, residencies, exhibitions, and commerce. She is talking at 3pm on Sunday 10th May about The Leach Pottery: Community and Legacy.
Contemporary ceramicist, Freya Bramble-Carter stands alongside a collector of her work, Henriane Mourgue d’Algue, in a lively discussion about what it means to collect this medium today. The panel will be moderated by Collection Manager and Founder of CURA Art, Georgia Powell. The group will consider how collecting ceramics differs from other art forms and collectables, ceramics’ aesthetic appeal and functionality and how it offers a vessel for self-exploration. In an age of the development of AI, the panel will place the handmade and ancient techniques at the fore, considering how material affects response. The talk, Collecting Contemporary Ceramics is at 11.30am on Friday 8th May.
Catrin Jones is Chief Curator of the V&A Wedgwood Collection. She has published widely on historic and contemporary ceramics and silver. Her talk, Wedgwood as a Creative Sourcebook is at 3pm on Friday 8th May, explores why Wedgwood remains an icon of ceramics, and what that means in a changing world. From the enduring importance of Wedgwood’s anti-slavery medallion, to the major project to make the whole 175,000 strong V&A Wedgwood Collection and Archive available online for the first time by 2030, Catrin will share insights into Wedgwood’s enduring impact on creativity in ceramics and beyond.
Perhaps best known for the extraordinary funerary chapel at Compton, Surrey, consecrated in 1898, Mary Seton Watts (née Fraser Tytler, 1849-1938) was an artist, maker, designer, biographer, and founder and married to the painter George Frederic Watts OMRA (1817-1904). This talk by Penelope Hines, Collections Curator at Watts Gallery, Surrey titled Mary Seton Watts: I have followed, worked and loved is at 11.30am on Saturday 9th May. The talk explores Mary’s work, which spanned the 19th and 20th centuries, and the impact of the end of the Victorian period, the Arts & Crafts movement, and the rise of Art Nouveau.
Fernando Casasempere’s work rests on three fundamental pillars: pre-Hispanic art, landscape and the environment, and nearly 30 years of living in London. Since 1991, he has been speaking about ecology, yet we face the reality that current technology does not avoid the enormous energy consumption that firing a kiln demands. The question is how to maintain, despite this incongruence, a coherent discourse that genuinely contributes to addressing
the climate crisis. His talk, Firing Up: Art, Ecology and the Inconvenient Kiln is at 11.30am on Sunday 10th May. Casasempere has exhibited extensively in the UK, Chile, North America, Japan and Europe and is renowned for monumental installations including the critically acclaimed Out of Sync at Somerset House, London, 2012.
Mella Shaw is an artist using clay to make thought-provoking objects and site-specific installations rooted in activism. For over a decade she has made publicly engaged environmental work addressing specific issues in the global climate crisis. Mella will speak about her practice and her conscious choice to use clay to raise awareness and inspire action in the face of the global environmental and ecological crisis. Her talk, Ceramics for Change: Art, Action and Activism is at 1.30pm on Sunday 10th May will explore her practice and her conscious choice to use clay to raise awareness and inspire action in the face of the global environmental and ecological crisis. Using examples of her own ceramic projects: Harvest, Sounding Line and Rare Earth Rising, she will explore themes of tipping points, thresholds, longing and loss.
