“Clay records everything—every push, drag, and breath. I work quickly so the figure feels alive, not ornamental; a suggestion of a living being that meets you in feeling rather than likeness.”
Sharon Griffin is a figurative artist working primarily in clay, using the material as a “3D canvas” to draw in space. Based in Wellington, Shropshire, she takes regular walks into nearby woodland, letting textures, smells, light, and “secret spaces” shape an emotional response that flows back into the studio. The result is a body of work that reads like lived gesture: swift, honest marks that hold themes of love, loss, displacement, vulnerability, and strength.
Griffin’s making is fast and intuitive. She builds, scores, and presses with minimal tools so the clay records every decision, allowing forms to “reveal themselves” through process—a conversation between hand, material, and memory. Preliminary drawings from life and 2D sketches inform the start of a piece, but it is the immediacy of touch that gives each figure its presence: unfinished edges, visible seams, and energetic surfaces that keep the work open and alive.
A Selected Member of the Royal Society of Sculptors (MRSS) and the Craft Potters Association (CPA), Griffin has presented projects and installations at major platforms including COLLECT Open (2022) and OXO Tower Gallery (The Tangible Project, 2023). With Wayne Chisnall she developed The Unlockdown Project, shown at COLLECT Open and at Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum’s Open (2024). She has spoken and demonstrated at the International Ceramics Fair (ICF) and served as Guest Tutor for the Centre for the Study of Figurative Ceramics (2023). Her work is represented in public and private collections, notably the Aberystwyth University Ceramics Collection (2022).
Alongside her studio practice, Griffin oversees a community pottery workshop and is a qualified art lecturer with substantial FE and HE teaching experience. Across all contexts—studio, classroom, and community—her aim is consistent: to use clay to connect, to communicate without words, and to keep the figure feeling courageously human.
Represented by The Soden Collection, Shrewsbury.