Fiona Thompson

CRAFT: CERAMICS

REGION: Edinburgh, Scotland, UK

Fiona Thompson is an Edinburgh-based ceramic artist whose practice centres on hand-built sculptural vessels with richly layered surfaces. She graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 1994 and later completed an M.Phil at the University of Sunderland, researching tourism, photography and the souvenir.  

Her vessels combine traditional hand-building with painting, printmaking and photographic imagery. She builds forms by coiling or slab construction, then develops their surfaces through coloured slips, incised marks, lino and monoprint imagery, glazes and decals made from her own drawings and photographs.  

Travel, museums, souvenirs, nostalgia, memory and natural-history collections have been recurring sources of inspiration. Her current Porto series, for example, emerged from a trip to Portugal and explores the idea of the ceramic vessel as a personal souvenir of a place.  

She has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, including Edinburgh Art Fair, the Royal Geographic Society, The Clay Studio in Philadelphia and the Yingge Ceramics Museum in Taiwan. She also co-runs Cyan Clayworks, an open-access ceramics studio and teaching space in Edinburgh.