stephen dixon

Left: Now then Captain lad, 1995 Below: Hats, 1995

Stephen Dixon is Professor of Contemporary Crafts at Manchester School of Art. His career as a maker is defined by a commitment to politically engaged practice, and a belief in the power of craft to engage the public imagination and to make a difference. As an academic and researcher as well as a maker, his practice engages with the narrative and decorative traditions of figurative ceramics, and brings this rich visual vocabulary to bear on contemporary issues.

He studied Fine Art at Newcastle University followed by an MA in Ceramics and Glass at the Royal College of Art. Early exhibitions in London with Contemporary Applied Arts and the Crafts Council established a reputation for ceramics with a biting political and social satire. Anatol Orient introduced Dixon’s figurative vessels to the U.S.A., resulting in solo exhibitions at Pro-Art, St. Louis, Garth Clark Gallery, New York and Nancy Margolis Gallery, New York. Dixon’s politically engaged ceramic practice was comprehensively surveyed in a major solo exhibition ‘The Sleep of Reason’, a twenty-year retrospective at Manchester Art Gallery in 2005. He was awarded the inaugural V&A ceramics studio residency in 2009, where he embarked on a new body of work exploring political portraiture.

Dixon combines his studio ceramic practice with regular forays into public and community arts; In 2000 he received an Arts Council Year of the Artist award for ‘Asylum’, a collaborative project with Amnesty International U.K. and Kosovan refugees and in 2021 ‘The Ship of Dreams and Nightmares’ was selected as the winner of the AWARD prize at the British Ceramics Biennial in Stoke-on-Trent.

His work features in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Arts & Design New York, the British Council, the Crafts Council, the V&A, the Everson Museum of Art and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

stephen dixon

Left: The Trumposaurus, 2019 Centre: Cultural Assimilation, 2019 Right: The Good Ship Brexit, 2019