A Matthew Chambers vessel is hard to walk past. The concentric rings and earthy colours pull the eye inward, at once geometric and organic, the kind of object people keep returning to. He is drawn to the circle above all, for having no beginning and no end.
He works without drawings, letting one form suggest the next as he goes. Each piece is assembled from dozens of separately thrown rings, joined while the clay is still leather hard and dried slowly over weeks so it does not warp, with the colour mixed into the clay rather than glazed on top. It looks engineered, though it is made entirely by hand, and no two pieces share the same inner pattern.
Chambers trained at Bath School of Art and the Royal College of Art, and his work is held by the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Ulster Museum.
He lives and works from a small studio on the Isle of Wight.
