Janice Tchalenko obituary

Janice Tchalenko, who has died aged 76, was an admired ceramicist, designer and artist who bridged the gap between art and large-scale production. She collaborated on textiles and ceramics with Designers Guild and Next Interiors, and created a series of satirical ceramic sculptures with Roger Law of Spitting Image.

In the 1960s and 70s she made fashionable domestic wares, “brown pots”, informed by the work of Michael Cardew and Bernard Leach, working, she ironically noted, as “a peasant potter in Peckham”. But in 1981 she revolutionised the field, shocking many studio potter colleagues, by evolving glazes of great richness and depth of colour to adorn reduction-fired stoneware; painting, sponging and slip-trailing complex semi-abstract decorative schema on bold simplified shapes; using piscatorial and amphibian casts as handles and knops; and taking inspiration from the ceramics of the Middle East, from the capricious mannerist Bernard Palissy, and from European rococo earthenware and porcelain and 19th century art pottery.

A series of large thrown bowls, flared jugs with flowing handles and press moulded dishes followed – magnificent objects, much admired and much imitated. But her work was, in tune with her socialist politics, to reach a wider audience from 1983 in collaboration with Steven Course at the Dartington Training Workshop, renamed Dart Pottery in 1984. Her tableware ranges for Dart, Poppy, Black Rose and Leopard, were an instant success, winning both the Manchester Prize for Art in Production and the BBC Radio 4 Enterprise Award in 1988. Production at Dart, initially hand-thrown, became more mechanised as demand soared. Decoration was always hand-painted using techniques evolved by Tchalenko.

She went on to design furnishing textiles and ceramics for Tricia Guild at Designers Guild in 1985, a range of ceramics for Next Interiors in 1986 and tableware for Poole Pottery in 1994-95. Until 2006 she continued to work with Poole, creating designs for the John Lewis Partnership, and more recently she launched a collection for Royal Stafford.

Tchalenko had experienced the conservatism of the British industry when seeking to have her and Carol McNicoll’s designs made for Next Interiors and she became an early enthusiastic visitor to Chinese factories, working in 1991 as a decoration and glaze consultant at the Goa You porcelain factory in Jiangsu province, where she was given 10 days to save the factory, and the following year at the Blue Factory in Yixing and Quidong. Her experiences left her with a store of remarkable, often humorous stories and an abiding admiration for Chinese skill and industriousness. In 2006-12 she created surface decoration for the design firm Queensberry Hunt for production in Chaozhou, South China.

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Tchalenko was born in Rugby, Warwickshire. Her mother, Marjorie Cooper (nee Dodd), a telephonist, died soon after giving birth to Janice and her twin brother, David. The twins spent their first four years with their paternal grandparents at Theddlethorpe on the wind-blown marshland coast of Lincolnshire. Subsequently they were brought up in Coventry, where her father, Eric Cooper, worked as a GPO engineer. After attending Manor Park primary school, Janice won a place at Barr’s Hill, a girls’ grammar school.

Further education was discouraged by her family and at 16 she became an accounts clerk in the same GPO building as her father and brother. Aged 17 she took the clerical officer exams for the Foreign Office, moving to London to work at Carlton House Terrace. She dealt with embassy accounts, meeting many a burnt-out case damaged by challenging postings abroad, her life a novelistic mix of early Muriel Spark with a dash of Graham Greene and Patrick Hamilton.

In 1964, she married John Tchalenko, a geologist, and later a researcher and filmmaker, who had moved into a flat in her building. Because he was of Russian descent, Janice was deemed a security risk and lost her Foreign Office job.

She decided to become a potter, learning to throw at Putney School of Art, working as potter’s assistant and as an art therapist at the Priory hospital. From 1969 to 1971 she took the vocational pottery course at Harrow School of Art, a highly practical training that taught production throwing, kiln and wheel building and glaze and clay technology.

She became an outstanding thrower and was recruited by Colin Pearson to teach the skill at Camberwell School of Art (1972-87). There she encountered the ceramic artist Glenys Barton, thus meeting a whole generation of outstanding female graduates from the Royal College of Art – Alison Britton, Jill Crowley, Carol McNicoll and Jacqui Poncelet. They partly inspired her to turn to freer forms and vivid colours as did her travels with John in Russia and Iran.

Tchalenko went on to teach at the Royal College of Art (1981-96), being elected a fellow of the college in 1987.

Law, who had long admired and collected her work, became an unexpected collaborator in 1993. With the Spitting Image workshop, Law and Tchalenko created startling ceramic sculptures of each of the Seven Deadly Sins, in two versions, shown at and bought by the Victoria & Albert Museum, and also purchased by the British Council. In 1996, at the Richard Dennis Gallery, Law and Tchalenko showed Modern Antiques, Toby Jug-like caricatures of famous potters from Palissy to Leach, and editions of vases and bowls writhing with lizards and fish, with glazes developed by Steven Course, and modelling by Pablo Bach of Spitting Image.

There were further collaborations – with the furniture designer Jane Dillon, the sculptor Richard Wentworth, with Nick Mosse’s workshops in Ireland and with the ceramic designer Sue Pryke – Tchalenko’s house in Therapia Road, Peckham, being a nexus for artistic interchange. In the 1990s Tchalenko became an ambassador for British ceramics, curating exhibitions for the British Council and holding workshops all over the world. In 1992 she had a retrospective exhibition at the Ruskin Gallery, Sheffield. Crossing boundaries characterised Tchalenko’s career.

Seniority brought fresh friendships and further experimentation, including a turn to porcelain, printmaking and a series of large painterly ceramic panels. In 2014 she moved to a new studio in Forest Hill. Her final exhibitions were in France in autumn 2017. She was included in the remarkable L’Expérience de la Couleur at the Musée National de Céramique de Sèvres in Paris alongside Josef Albers, Sonia Delaunay and Yves Klein. At Hélène Aziza’s gallery, 19 rue Paul Fort, Paris, she showed among friends – Elisabeth Fritsch, Britton, McNicoll and Poncelet. The sculptor Richard Deacon, a fellow exhibitor, recalled her new world of darkly beautiful gigantic platters, all of which sold immediately.

Her work is in many public collections including the V&A, the Ashmolean Museum, the British Museum, the Fitzwilliam Museum, Los Angeles County Museum and the Musée National de Céramique de Sèvres.

Tchalenko is survived by John and their son, Luke, and two grandchildren, Thea and Kira, and by her twin brother, David.