	Francine DELPIERRE (France) Dates: 1913-1968 Born in France, she took up pottery in her 30s, originally working in the pottery town of Vallauris, where Picasso first worked with clay. However she returned to work in Paris where she founded an atelier with Fance Franck. She was a friend of Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada with whom she sometimes exhibited, sharing their ideals of traditional pottery and oriental aesthetics. She favoured hand modelling her pots over wheel-throwing to retain spontaneity and give a greater freedom of form. However, she made hundreds of drawings as studies for her forms, observing her designs from different profiles before she touched the clay, therefore her designs were very calculated. Her use of colour was very subtle, with layers of transparent glaze and overlapping whites revealing a hint of red, brown or green. She often decorated her pots with a simple botanical motif inspired by her love of early studies of wild plants, flowers and grasses, which she melted into the glaze, giving an effect similar to a watercolour painting. She described pottery as "the skin of thoughtform".

Francine DELPIERRE (France)

Dates: 1913-1968

Born in France, she took up pottery in her 30s, originally working in the pottery town of Vallauris, where Picasso first worked with clay. However she returned to work in Paris where she founded an atelier with Fance Franck. She was a friend of Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada with whom she sometimes exhibited, sharing their ideals of traditional pottery and oriental aesthetics. She favoured hand modelling her pots over wheel-throwing to retain spontaneity and give a greater freedom of form. However, she made hundreds of drawings as studies for her forms, observing her designs from different profiles before she touched the clay, therefore her designs were very calculated.

Her use of colour was very subtle, with layers of transparent glaze and overlapping whites revealing a hint of red, brown or green. She often decorated her pots with a simple botanical motif inspired by her love of early studies of wild plants, flowers and grasses, which she melted into the glaze, giving an effect similar to a watercolour painting. She described pottery as "the skin of thoughtform".