Gillian Lowndes

Gillian Lowndes died on 2 October 2010, aged 74, from cancer.

She lived for a time in Toppesfield, Essex, then following the death of her husband in 2000 she moved to Spitalfields in London.

Her work is represented in many collections in Britain and she has had major shows at the Crafts Council (1987) and Contemporary Applied Arts (1994) and major exhibitions such as The Raw and the Cooked (1993–1994).

Since the early 1960s and 70s her work has challenged the traditional notions surrounding the form of a vessel and fine art. Through her non-traditional experimental methods of incorporating found objects and materials such as wire and various objects from found in everyday life into her ceramic work, she continually challenges the orthodox world of pure ceramics.

Lowndes' approach and experimentation with form and materials is much like that of the Process Artists of the 1960s as well. Lowndes believes that "materials are the source of the ideas as well as their expression." Lowndes said of her own work that "...it is the methods and materials that produce the ideas, not the other way round. The choice of materials and the assemblage of pieces lead her towards the object and this process gives her work a strangeness that is visually rich, yet her work is still rooted with the ceramic process and material."

Gillian Lowndes (19 June 1936 – 2 October 2010) was an English ceramics sculptor.

Born in West Kirby, Cheshire in 1936, she spent much of her childhood in British India. She studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts beginning in 1957 and spent a year at L'École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1960. In the early 1970s she travelled to Nigeria with her husband, Ian Auld, a trip that would prove to be influential in her subsequent work. From 1975 until the early 1990s, she taught part-time at Camberwell College of Arts and Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design.