Artist Transforms Potclays’ Industrial Heritage into Bold Screen-Printed Stoneware Vase

In a recent commission for Potclays, artist Jamie Coan immersed himself in the history and physical environment of the company’s site. After photographing the buildings, machinery and material processes, he developed bespoke screens derived from these images, including a pixelated portrait of the company’s founder.

The resulting large-scale vase was thrown using Potclays’ own Staffordshire Stoneware; clay sourced locally and processed on site. Its form draws inspiration from the industrial machinery used in that very process, creating a dialogue between material, image and origin. Hand made screen-printed ceramic transfers were applied to the leather-hard surface, fusing photographic documentation with handcrafted form.

The interior of the vessel is glazed, while the exterior remains matte; a deliberate reference to the industrial heritage and raw materiality of the subject matter.

Jamie studied Fine Art at the Birmingham School of Art, graduating in 1993. Three decades later, after a sustained career in the corporate sector, he returned to full-time making with renewed focus and conviction.

Jamie’s early return to practice centred on oil painting, where he developed an expressive and energetic visual language through urban landscapes and portraiture. The city, its architecture, surfaces, and human presence, became both subject and catalyst, informing his interest in texture, structure and atmosphere.

In recent years, his practice has shifted into ceramics. Working primarily on the wheel, Jamie produces functional stoneware vessels that act as sites for image-making. This transition has not replaced his painterly concerns but extended them. Clay offers both surface and form; a physical architecture onto which narrative and place can be embedded.

Through experimentation, he began incorporating screen printing into his ceramic work, allowing photographic imagery to merge with thrown form. Urban landscapes, captured through his own lens, are translated into layered compositions that wrap and respond to the curvature of each vessel. The pot becomes both object and document - a three-dimensional canvas carrying traces of place, industry and memory.

Jamie’s practice sits at the intersection of photography, print and ceramics. His work explores how landscape, industry and identity can be held within functional form - where surface becomes archive, and the vessel becomes a record of place.