Susan Parkinson
Susan Parkinson is best known as an English potter and for her work with the Arts Dyslexia Trust.
Early life and education
She was born Susan Elizabeth Sanderson in Calcutta. Her father was a wine merchant with an interest in sport and natural history, while her mother was proficient in dress making and craft works. Parkinson and her elder sister Diana were brought to England and pursued their schooling at Maltman's Green School, Gerrard's Cross. At Maltman's, she became good friends with Sylvia Priestly, and the two were given their own studio in one of the school turrets.Parkinson completed her education at the Royal College of Art, where she studied under Frank Dobson and John Skeaping. She won fourth year scholarship and the RCA Life Drawing Prize, the first time this had ever been won by a Sculpture School student.
Career
After her marriage to Richard Parkinson and a summer working for Harry Davis at the Crowan Pottery, Cornwall, Parkinson and Richard set up Richard Parkinson Ltd., generally referred to as the "Parkinson Pottery". In the stables and oast house of the home at Brabourne Lees, Kent, Richard's primary role was to provide the physical and technical resources, the materials and the workshop facilities, to support Parkinson's creative talents in designing and decorating the company's distinctive pottery ware.Slipcasting in porcelain was the technique used to reproduce Parkinson's sculptures for a mass market. Output ranged from animals to humans together with more practical tableware. Highly stylised, distorted, flattened or elongated forms were finished with Parkinson's monochromatic graphic designs achieved with wax resist techniques, brown and later green-black pigments and gloss or matt glazes. At its peak, there were several assistants, production took place around the clock and Parkinson Pottery was being sold not only in British department stores such as Heal's, Liberty, and Dunns of Bromley but across the Atlantic in America.
A series of models of contemporary actors designed and made for the Briglin Pottery featured in a 2011 broadcast of the Antiques Roadshow and can also be seen on the Victoria and Albert Museum web site. One of Parkinson's final pieces of pottery was a bust of Winston Churchill, who personally approved reproduction of the design.
In the early 1960s, a combination of the tragic accidental death of the Parkinsons' talented young model maker and the extreme physical exhaustion involved in running the Pottery lead to financial difficulties and the break up of both the company and the marriage. Although some of the moulds were sold to George Gray at the Cinque Ports Pottery, an officer from HM Customs and Excise insisted on the destruction of stock and moulds in an adjacent field to ensure no further income could be made.