Amanda Crump: The unusual Yorkshire ceramicist inspired by her son's picture books

Crump, who is based in the city, works part-time as an art teacher at Meadowhead School, specialising in 3D – textiles, ceramics, woodwork and metalwork. She has always also made her own work and by early 2021 she had accumulated quite a few pieces.

“I had a stack of things piling up in the shed and I took a couple of boxes of stuff up to the Cupola Gallery for their Under the Bed Sale,” she says. The sale is an annual event held in January at the gallery which invites artists to bring along artworks that have languished in storage for a while or are no longer loved to sell them off at bargain prices. It is very popular with artists and art lovers alike.

“I really like it, I always go along and have bought things there but had never taken any of my work in,” says Crump. “I dropped off my boxes and then soon after I got a call from the gallery director Karen Sherwood, asking me to come in for a chat.”

Out of that conversation eventually came the exhibition, Theriotypes and Folk Tales, which runs at the Cupola Gallery until the end of this month. Therianthropy is defined as the integration of animal and human identities and describes perfectly a series of Crump’s artworks, Creatures, which are showcased in the exhibition. These very striking ceramic animals, dressed in human clothes and with human characteristics, look like they could have stepped out of a Lewis Carol novel, a Beatrix Potter story or any number of fairytales or folk tales.

The inspiration for them came initially from the stories and picture books that Crump would read to her young son, who is now ten years old. “I was fascinated by the illustrations, particularly of animals, and I started thinking about how we often anthropomorphize the creatures with which we share our world,” she says. “I found that really interesting, how we try in a way to make things more palatable. I definitely don’t want my creatures to be cute. I want them to be ‘real’ and have a kind of back story, I suppose.”

She began making the Creatures after doing a school project with her Year 7 students. “I invited them to research national dress and we made a little figure in costume – they made some amazing ones and I thought I would have a go. They were human figures to start with and then I tried making one of a deer with twigs as antlers and it just went from there really.”

The creatures certainly aren’t sentimental in any way – in fact, like fairytales, while some of them are genial and warm, others are quite unsettling and dark. All of them have a sense of dignity and, crucially, an individuality about them.

“I like to play around with the different kinds of characters,” she says. “I have got to the stage now where I see an animal and I can imagine it in clothes and what kind of personality it would have. There are stories or anecdotes that will inspire me and I have lots of books about folk tales that I can dig into and find imagery that I think will look striking or that will challenge me in the creation of it. I like to try things out, I don’t like to limit myself.”

The creatures are incredibly detailed and intricate pieces that take several days of focussed work in the studio to make. “With some of the more complicated ones it can take me three solid days and then another two days to decorate,” says Crump.

“To begin with I sometimes do a few sketches – I normally have a sketchbook with me and jot things down in there – but I find that I am better with clay than drawing. I am much more comfortable in 3D. I start making the head first and then as the personality comes out, I go with it. It is quite instinctive. Everything that I make is hollow and then I sculpt using the clay in different states, after that I decorate it using glazes and oxides.

"I will sometimes add vintage buttons, horsehair or feathers. What the figures are wearing looks like fabric but it is all clay – I want people to have to touch it to check – I like the fact that it is playing with your perception.”

Alongside Crump’s work, which is on display in the main gallery, there is another exhibition, The Secret Postcard Show, in the Cupola’s other art space. Amateur and professional artists are invited to create a postcard-sized artwork in any media with their contact details and signature on the back. Each postcard is displayed anonymously, all are priced at £15 and the buyer only discovers who the artist is after the piece is purchased, hence the secret.

The first Secret Postcard Show was launched by the gallery during the pandemic and proved so popular it has become an annual fundraising event with the proceeds being split equally between the Cupola and international disaster relief charities. This year the gallery has received postcards from all over the world including the United States, Australia, Ireland, Turkey, Taiwan and Spain.

Crump is delighted at being given the opportunity to share her work more widely through the exhibition at the Cupola.

“I have done a few things before but nothing major so this is really exciting,” she says. And she is happy that making the Creatures has taken her work in a new direction.

“At university the type of ceramics I studied was mostly tableware and functional objects – I would never have done or made anything like these.”

It has renewed her passion for ceramics which she felt she had moved away from a little. “I am so glad that I have returned to it because I have come back to it with a completely different mindset,” she says. “It’s been lovely to have that feeling of really wanting to get into the studio – it plays on my mind if I’m not there. That is so satisfying.”

Theriotypes and Folk Tales by Amanda Crump and The Secret Postcard Show are at the Cupola Gallery in Sheffield until September 30. All the work is for sale. cupolagallery.com