Tamsin van Essen

Tamsin van Essen is a British ceramicist, whose work explores notions of beauty and impermanence through examining scientific, medical and social historic themes. Material experimentation is a strong characteristic of her approach, using porcelain and fine bone china to produce one-off, intriguing and unusual pieces.

Tamsin van Essen, Future Heritage 2016 Alumna

van Essen has exhibited extensively throughout the world, including at Sotheby’s and the Saatchi Gallery in London, Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, Design Miami, the Nobel Museum in Stockholm, Sévres Musée National de Céramique, Paris and other prestigious international locations. Her work has been acquired for the permanent collections of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Fonds National d'Art Contemporain in Paris, the Wellcome Collection and the Royal Pharmaceutical Society Museum in London.

Tamsin van Essen works mainly in fine china and porcelain, using slip-casting and a variety of traditional making processes - carving, inlay, sprigging, piercing, slip-trailing - but subverting them to create new results. She also experiments extensively with ceramic materials.

Syon Blue By Tamsin van Essen

At Future Heritage

She presented three related projects at Future Heritage 2016. All three were made especially for the show, based on her research in Syon House and its grounds.

‘Syon Blue,’ was a suite of vases drawing inspiration from the opulent 18th century interiors of Syon House, in West London. Exploring the idea of the modern garniture, Tamsin van Essen wanted to bring some of the rich history and elaborate elements of baroque pattern into a more contemporary collection of vases. Using cobalt blue, she created a less formal version of traditional blue and white porcelain, where the pattern becomes abstracted within the body of the vases, emerging and disappearing through layers of translucent porcelain.

‘Arcadian White,’ referenced the garnitures of vases commissioned for grand houses such as Syon House. The decorative technique is inspired by the elaborately detailed foliate plaster and raised stucco within these houses. Her aim was to create the feeling that the vases might keep growing even while sitting on a mantelpiece.

‘Salon du Chocolate,’ was a decadent salon chocolate set, for the ghost of Marie Antoinette. The translucent porcelain pieces appeared to be crumbling away in a delicately captured moment of beauty tinged with tragedy.

“Being involved in Future Heritage was a fantastic platform for showing my new work and meeting a wider range of people from the design and interiors world. It led to some good contacts, private commissions, as well as my showpiece work being bought by collectors.” - Tamsin van Essen

Current work

She is currently working on a series of ceramic tools that explore ancient medical technology. While living in India, she had been working with rough terracotta from Delhi potters' communities, using this to create forms derived from ancient Ayurvedic surgical tools, but abstracted into larger sculptural objects. Using simple, traditional production techniques - including hand carving and burnishing – she deliberately works on refining the surface of these clay pieces so they could be mistaken for wood or burnished metal.

Arcadian By Tamsin van Essen

If you would like to make an enquiry about Tamsin van Essen and commissions, get in touch here or visit her website www.tamsinvanessen.com