When Design Miami 2025, a global design fair, opens its doors on December 2 in South Florida, it will celebrate its 20th anniversary with one of Britain’s most imaginative and hardworking ceramic artists: Kate Malone.
The world-renowned potter — known for her exuberant vases, pots and sculptural forms that have been displayed in galleries and museums across the US, Europe and Asia — describes herself as “addicted to clay.” Quoting British sculptor Nicola Hicks, Malone often repeats a mantra that fuels her creativity: “Work makes work.” To her, inspiration doesn’t precede effort — it follows it.
Her handcrafted pieces draw inspiration from the natural world, often adorned with seeds, fruits, and organic shapes that ripple with energy and sell for a premium: A small vase can go for thousands of dollars.
Malone’s signature pumpkins, pineapples and gourds celebrate fecundity or growth and fertility, and the joy of life itself.
“Optimism is my big thing,” she said in a video call from her studio in Kent, southeast of London. “A big ebullient pumpkin or a pineapple with its leaves like a crown, stretching out” — they give a feel-good response. They’re symbols of hospitality and joy,” she added.
That deep fascination with nature began in childhood. “My dad said, even as a tiny baby, I would sit looking at a daisy … or a blade of grass … as if I were studying it,” Malone recalled.
Mark Piolet, director at Adrian Sassoon, one of the UK’s leading contemporary art dealers, who has represented Malone for years, said, “Through combining her conscious appreciation of familiar ceramic forms with her innate creative drive, she transforms the utilitarian basis of her art into otherworldly sculptures that brim with a sense of the life force.”
With her work, he added, she is able to “step beyond the vessel” in the same way as “other ceramicists, from Josiah Wedgwood to Picasso to Grayson Perry.”
Born in London, Malone, now 66, studied ceramics at Bristol Polytechnic before earning a master’s at the Royal College of Art. She favors a bright, vibrant palette that gives her work its unmistakable presence.
After decades of working with clay, Malone says her art has evolved — from sensuality to strength. “When I was in my 30s and 40s, the work was quite sexy,” she said. “Now it’s kind of less sexy and there’s a different strength to it.”
While viewers might not always grasp the deeper symbolism of strength and endurance, she believes the meaning resonates subconsciously.
In 2019, she was honored with an MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) by Queen Elizabeth II for her services to the field of ceramics.
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Malone’s main studio was still in London. Feeling responsible for her assistants’ livelihoods, she quickly devised a plan.
“I said to them, ‘grab some clay, grab some molds, get home,’” she recalled. Then she refined her instructions. “I then said … ‘you do these seeds, and you do these blackberries, and you do these acorns.’ And then I sent a taxi … I don’t know how we managed it. We got all the pieces back to Kent.”
Around the same time, a plea arrived from southern India asking for about $1,000 to help itinerant workers building a shelter in the woods — near a pottery Malone had recently visited. She decided to help the best way she knew how: through her art.
By selling a few of her ceramic pineapples online, Malone raised more than $30,000 for the cause.
Despite the isolation and fear, she reflects fondly on that endeavor. “Covid was kind of lovely in that respect,” she said.
Community engagement has always been at the heart of Malone’s career. She has created large-scale works for hospitals, schools, parks, and public spaces — including a sculpture called “Rise and Shine, Magic Fish” in the marsh that is part of the Waterworks Center Nature Reserve in Lee Valley Regional Park in East London.
One of her most ambitious projects was completed in 2015, when she collaborated with architects to clad the facade of 24 Savile Row, in London’s Mayfair — a prestigious hub for luxury shopping.
“Working with Kate on 24 Savile Row was an incredibly rewarding partnership,” Stephen Pey, board director at EPR Architects, the company that handled the project, said via email.
“The level of attention to detail was remarkable; every one of the 10,000 hand-glazed tiles is unique, shaped by her process of growing crystals at high temperatures. Effectively three-dimensional and in four differing textures — three white and one black with blue crystals — the tiles reflect and refract daylight,” he added.
Malone’s mastery of crystalline glazes sets her apart. She has developed thousands of glaze recipes, most through her own decades of experimentation, and shares them freely with students.
The glaze is applied by hand to the interior and exterior of each pot or handcrafted sculpture and allowed to dry before it’s fired.
Her vessels are given their signature patterns and luster by controlling temperature changes in the kiln, which encourages crystals to bloom in the glaze. “The crystals, they grow around little nuclei of imperfection that’s dragged off the surface of the pot, because the glaze is running off like treacle (sticky syrup),” she explained.
As funding cuts squeezed ceramics programs out of British schools, Malone decided to act. In 2020, she co-founded FiredUp4, a charity that puts clay into the hands of young people through after-school clubs across the UK.
“With ceramics now less commonly taught … there is a general lack (of) familiarity with the magical transformation of wet clay, to gleaming vessel,” Piolet said. Malone’s initiative hopes to rekindle that wonder.
Pottery is one of humanity’s oldest inventions, dating back nearly 30,000 years. For Malone, it’s far more than a useful craft — it’s a spiritual practice.
“My decorative work is about me and my expression,” Malone explained, describing the different focuses of her creative energy, and added, for “the public arts … it’s about service to a place. And I think artists, I think as a craftsperson … we help things function.”
