Bridget Brittain grew up in South Africa, married and raised her own family in Hong Kong, and is now settled on their family farm in rural Dorset. This shifting sense of place runs through her work as a ceramic artist. Brittain works with high-fire stoneware, drawn to its durability and honesty, yet much of her making happens when the clay is at its most fragile. By working with the clay in this vulnerable state, she embraces uncertainty, allowing tension and risk to become part of the finished form. The physical act of working by hand—pressing, stretching, and balancing the clay—echoes the rhythms of family life and the continual adjustments of finding one’s place.
Brittain uses the ancient technique of sgraffito, sketching through the dark surface to reveal the light clay beneath. This deliberate scratching away is an act of mindfulness, giving her time to reflect while creating layered surfaces of trees, nests, birds, and eggs. All symbols of shelter, migration, and fragility. For her, making art that is functional is essential, all that we use should be beautiful, art should be imbedded in our everyday.’
Brittain's motifs embody questions of nesting: what we carry with us into new and unfamiliar places, what we leave behind. The stark contrasts of black against white, branches against sky, birds in flight or settled in their nests, mirror the search for stability within change. Through form, texture and imagery, Brittain returns again and again to one question: What is the true nature of home?