The New and Emerging Makers Competition began in 2011. It is an opportunity for UK potters and artists working with clay, who have graduated within the past five years, to exhibit their work at the International Ceramics Festival 2025.
Sponsored by Potclays
The winner of the Potclays and ICF New and Emerging Maker Award 2025 will be selected based on their full submission and the work on display in the New and Emerging Maker’s exhibition during the weekend. The visiting public will also be able to contribute towards the voting. The winner will receive a £200 voucher for supplies at Potclays LTD, an interview published on the Potclays website, a framed certificate and ongoing social and digital media support e.g. on request, press releases for their news and events published in their monthly email newsletter and social shares. The winner will also receive a ticket to ICF 2027.
The four finalists are:
Juli Bharucha
My lifelong love affair with clay originated through employment in a commercial pottery, where handling this amazing material became second nature. After studying for a ceramics BA at Cardiff I went onto work for two years in Ghana as a VSO (Voluntary Services Overseas) supporting research to develop locally made bricks and exhibiting with Ghanaian artists at the British Council. Returning home to the UK, I set up a studio focusing on teaching, community projects and showing work.
In 2021 I took the decision to study for a Ceramic MA at Bath Spa in 2021, allowing time to reflect and reevaluate my personal creative direction. Experimenting with porcelain structure, the interplay of light and photography, my work investigated our powerful emotional inner worlds. Achieving my MA allowed new pathways to open. I was fortunate to receive a DYCP award from the Arts Council through which I have been able to continue further experimentation, expanding and consolidating designs initiated when studying for my MA.
Exploring colour, inlaid surfaces, pattern forming and reforming to morph into other configurations are ongoing investigations with the aim of creating a visual language conveying our human interconnectedness. Winning a bursary from Fresh Air Sculpture to sculpt work for the 2024 show, and being selected to exhibit with the Chelsea and Bath Arts Societies and RWA have all contributed to the expansion of my practice.
The power of clay, the continual internal dialogue to push boundaries and create is as potent as ever. It is an unfolding story, with each chapter building upon the previous one.
Website: www.julibharuchaceramics.co.uk
Instagram: @julibharuchaceramics
Ruth Petersen
Originally from Pembrokeshire Ruth went from school to London to study theatre. After raising her family she studied BA in Textiles at Carmarthen School of Art followed by an MA in Swansea School of Art. Since graduating she has been part of the I Fyny associate programme with Oriel Myrddin, Carmarthen and participated in the In:site programme with Craft Space, Birmingham. She has shown her work at Collect 2025, Yr Eisteddfod Genedlaethol 2023, as well as numerous smaller galleries. Ruth is represented by the First of March Gallery, based on Gower. Having lived in high-rise housing on the Ledbury Estate, Peckham she chose to investigate tower block problems, focusing on large panel construction and also Grenfell Tower and the cladding tragedy.
Ruth’s practice investigates the living conditions of people whose housing is substandard, people who are at the mercy of the system. Using the woven structure to bind us all together followed by the delicate slip that covers everything up but then weakens and the dangerous cracks show. The ceramic represents a protective layer that fails to protect. Grown-on black crystals illustrate the creeping black mould as it silently spreads in the corners of homes. The woven steel is visible and not visible. The forms and textures resulting from these methods have a spontaneity as what happens in the kiln is not entirely within her control. Each piece twists and turns, deforms in the heat to create a new form. Buildings are more than just boxes to contain people.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ruth_petersen_/
Bethia Tam
Bethia Tam (b.1998) is a Hong Kong ceramics artist now based in the midlands, United Kingdom. After graduating from her BA visual arts, she set-up her own studio, participated in some exhibitions and art fairs as an independent artist, and worked as a pottery tutor to collaborate ceramics workshops with various participants including community centers, schools and hotels. She has also completed her MA studies in Ceramics in Stoke-on-Trent last year. Regarding herself as a material explorer, she focused on the interaction between clay and other materials, bringing out the transformation and possibilities of clay with an experimental approach.
In her latest project the Variations series, a material-led experimentation inspired by the metamorphosis of insects, especially the transformation of forms and shapes. By adopting the concept of materiality, risk taking played an important part in her practice. She sought for the state of equilibrium between the workmanship of risk and the workmanship of certainty. The sculpture is unique on its own since it’s impossible to replicate. During the process, the sculpture experienced various stages of transformation, especially during the firings. Echoing the life cycle of insects and showing the similarities between itself and ceramics. Furthermore, inspired by Arte Povera, Bethia chose to use found materials and recycled objects together with paper clay to create ceramic sculptures, unleashing the potential of clay. Each small piece of paper clay structure was assembled into a larger sculpture, through high firing, the structure transformed into a new form due to characteristics of earthenware, heat and gravity.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bethia.tam
Yilina Yang
Yilina Yang is a ceramic sculptor based in London. Her current body of work, The Ghosts of Vanity, examines the tension between form and emptiness. Through sculptural forms that between haunted and lavish, she evokes a death-anxiety that is less about physical decay than about the fading of meaning.
Yilina views herself as an observer of people’s reflection in front of impermanence. Ceramics, lasting much longer than human lifespan, satisfies to some extent our human desire for “eternity”. Her practice explores the poetics of impermanence. With a deep influence from historical Vanitas painting, her sculptures exist in a paradoxical state—between life and non-life, elegance and kitsch, the archaeological and the futuristic, capturing the tension between what endures and what fades, ultimately reflecting on the ways human construct meaning through objects that will outlast them.
Yilina is currently pursuing her MA in Ceramics and Glass at the Royal College of Art, following a BFA in Ceramics from the Rhode Island School of Design (2021–2024), and a foundation in Illustration at the University of the Arts London. Her work has been exhibited in group shows across the UK and the US, including at the Royal College of Art’s Hangar Gallery (London, 2025), Warbling Collective (London, 2024), and the Gelman Gallery (Providence, 2023). She is a recipient of several honors, including the Emerging Women Artists’ Award (Arts to Hearts Project, 2024), the John A. Chironna Memorial Scholarship (2023), and recognition as a Municipal Inheritor of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Monochrome Glaze, China.
Website: yilinay.cargo.site
Instagram:@yilina.yang
EMERGING MAKERS 2023 WINNER – Rhiannon Gwyn
My practice explores the deep connections humans have to place and landscape. I’m interested in how materials can act as identity markers; influencing the way in which we view ourselves and the world around us through the imprinting of emotion and memory onto our surroundings.
This involves exploring the full potential of slate by incorporating it with ceramic processes to create objects that depict forms of the land as part of a circular process whereby I have been personally shaped by my surrounding landscape form and shape its raw materials. A process of sculpting the materials that have sculpted me.
These features are reflected in the shapes of the melted slate through high firing and in the patterns and colours of the ceramics created through glazes made from materials collected from the land such as slate and the gorse flower.
https://www.rhiannongwyn.com Instagram: @rhiannongwyn.maker
