Viewing Room 08: Ceramic artist Caroline Chouler-Tissier and painter Mary Blue

Mary Blue

The impermanence of the tidal landscape shapes the East Anglian coastline where Mary lives and the environments she captures in paint.

Her paint is applied in generous smears, slurps and splashes over expertly drawn, softer veils of underpainting. The clarity of the coastal air, its eddies and squalls feel part of her vision, described in the vigour of her brush strokes.

Mary received MA (Fine Arts) from the University of Pennsylvania in 1989. She also studied at the Vermont Studio, the Maryland Art Institute, and Ecole des Arts d’Avignon France. Her work is exhibited in Norfolk, London and abroad. She was shortlisted for the Sir John Hurt Art Prize in 2020 and 2021.  

ARTIST STATEMENT

"My paintings reflect upon the impermanence of life and the forces of nature. I weave poetry into layers of jewel-toned colours exposing the overlooked hidden effects of time. I paint brilliant light and deep shadow, the far horizon and the passing of time.  I am drawn to the delicate, the broken, the most fleeting, these are timeless and possess a powerful resonance. At the crossroads of impermanence, beauty remains."

Caroline Chouler-Tissier

Caroline Chouler-Tissier’s practice is shaped by an acute awareness of finitude, intensified by the deaths of her parents when she was 23. This rupture redirected her life and work toward the landscapes of Derbyshire and Norfolk, where weather and terrain became active forces within her artistic narrative.

A pivotal experience in 2024 — an off-grid stay at the Watchhouse on Blakeney Point — deepened her commitment to environmental responsibility. In this landscape, nothing can be left behind; all traces must be carried out. This ethos informs her cyclical ceramic process, in which glaze sediment and clay shards are collected, fired and reintegrated into new works. Waste becomes generative, and each piece carries embedded histories.

Her 2026 commission for Superflux at Weltmuseum Wien, Relics of Abundance in The Craftocene, extended this inquiry. She reinterpreted the 1965 Nesso table lamp by Giancarlo Mattioli for Artemide in terracotta and gold leaf, revisiting the coiling technique she first learned from Magdalene Odundo.

Through hand-building, gestural glazing and materially cyclical processes, Chouler-Tissier positions clay as both substance and witness — to loss, renewal and fragile continuity.

Caroline studied Ceramics 3D Design (BA) at Loughborough College of Art and Design, and Ceramics and Glass (MA) at the Royal College of Art.

ARTIST STATEMENT

“My practice speaks of regeneration, resilience and self-reflection; to the commonality of the human condition. To the potential, through a greater connection with our landscape, for a closer relationship with one another.”