Teaching

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West Dean College 2019 is offering short courses in ceramics with Jane Abbott as tutor.

During a residency at Portsmouth grammar school in 2016, Jane introduced ceramics to the students and trained teachers and technicians. This year (2019) she has been working with the students there doing their GCE’s and A levels.

Jane trained at Brighton Art School, Gipsy Hill college London and at the university of London, Goldsmiths college in the 1970s.

She taught in secondary schools in London for five years before moving back to Brighton to start a family. Here she ran a variety of classes for children and adults and in 1982 set up a thriving ceramics department at St Mary’s Hall Girl’s School in Kemp town.

After nearly three decades at St Mary’s, Jane moved on, and was employed by Davison Comprehensive School in Worthing. Here she set up a Ceramics department where she teaches alongside her involvement in local community projects. Her commitment to Art education is still as strong as ever and she continues to influence new generations of young potters.

Since January 2012 she has been working at a new studio in West Street Lofts in Shoreham by Sea where she hopes to set up classes for adults and children. She will be exhibiting her new work there in June during the Adur Festival.

Simon Olding’s article in Ceramic Review Jul/Aug 2006 points out:

“Behind this jovial and seemingly carefree approach to making lies a profound intent. Abbott is a potter who puts her students first. ‘I teach before I pot,’ she says.”

“It took Abbott some time to settle on teaching ceramics; but once doing so she settled quickly and with determination. Pottery is, for her, both a valuable and instructive way to reveal the creative talents of her students, and the means to express her own fertile and vigorous enthusiasm for clay objects.”

“Teaching is for her a creative process, not a necessary chore.”

“Customarily Abbott finds a fertile flow of ideas between personal work and her teaching”