Photography By : Gabi Howard Baker
In the age of glossy feeds and curated studio tours, it’s easy to imagine pottery as shorthand for a certain lifestyle: neutral-toned homes, slow living, hands gracefully turning a wheel under natural light. But for Manchester-based ceramicist Alex Bishop, the reality is something far less polished.
“I didn’t grow up around many openly gay people,” Bishop recalls of his upbringing in Derbyshire. “Moving to Manchester gave me the space to figure out who I was - and clay has ended up being a big part of that journey.”
That journey takes shape across two distinct but interconnected practices. On one hand, Bishop works in stoneware to produce sculpture: quiet, weighty, abstract forms that hover between memory and figuration. “These pieces, they often come from memory, especially growing up around the blokes who worked down the quarry. The forms are a bit strange - I like when they almost feel like characters.”
On the other hand, his functional ceramics speak with a lighter register. Playful, colourful, and attuned to the rhythms of everyday life, they bring cheer to the tables of a city where, as Bishop explains, “it rains most days.” This duality, between gravitas and humour, depth and accessibility, reflects a practice that resists being streamlined into a single narrative.
But Bishop is also keen to challenge how ceramics is represented more broadly. “I’ve been thinking a lot about how pottery — especially online, often gets shown as a sort of ideal lifestyle. But that doesn’t reflect my experience, or a lot of people making work in the North.
The reality is a bit messier, it’s shared spaces, night-time sketchbooks, music drifting in from the hallway. It’s pie and mash upbringings, learning how to wrap gyozas with your best mate, setting off the fire alarm.”
This vision of making - provisional, communal, threaded through with both tradition and improvisation, complicates the smoother stories often told about craft. It opens up a space where art is not separate from life, but entangled with it.
Today, Bishop divides his time between working as a ceramics technician and teacher - a role he first took up “to help with rent” but has since grown to love, and developing his own practice in a shared studio just outside the city.
Experimentation remains at the heart of his process. Recently, he has begun working with markers alongside clay, testing how surface and line might unsettle or expand the language of ceramics.
“I’m still very much in the middle of figuring things out, personally and creatively,” he reflects. “But that in-between space feels honest, and worth showing.”
It is precisely this openness, to uncertainty, to play, to the contradictions of northern life and queer becoming - that makes Bishop’s work resonate. His ceramics refuse the fantasy of the perfect lifestyle object and instead invite us to sit with something else: the strange, the weighty, the cheerful, the unpolished. The things that, together, make a life.
