Fliff Carr is a designer and maker of simple yet refined ceramic tableware and interior products. Fliff has worked with clay in her studio in North London for the last 16 years.

Fliff began working with ceramics after enrolling in an adult education programme for ceramics at City Lit in London. Fliff worked whilst spending one day a week on the ceramics course. By 1992, she found a studio to rent with three other ceramic artists who taught each other over the years, experimenting and sharing ideas and skills, going on short courses and practising. Previous to this, Fliff worked with sculpture and design through her time as a special effects make-up artist for film and television.

Fliff’s finely thrown and hand-rolled work is an eclectic mix of whimsical, often surprising pieces. An irregular rim or extended handle lends a sense of lively fluidity and delicacy to the work. Inspired by her love of collected objects, Fliff uses artefacts and fragments of a past narrative as a constant inspiration for her work, often drawn from the British Museum’s Enlightenment Galleries where objects are displayed in labelled boxes for scientists and artists as collections for study. She references details from fields as diverse as book illustration, cathedral glass, graffiti, machinery, masonry and lace which inform the texture, shape and imagery present in her collection.

Fliff has a fluid approach when working with white earthenware clay, which she embosses, stamps or inlays with subtle shades of coloured slip, underglazes and textures from her favourite vintage fabrics and found objects. Dark lines, and thinly drawn or inscribed designs unify and provide a common motif in Fliff’s understated, contemporary aesthetic. 

Fliff works in small collections of ceramics of the same shape or size in one session, aiming to embellish each piece with a slight difference to create a one-off quality in every ceramic.