Living Up To One's Teapot - Opening Event Friday 26 June 2026 6pm - 7.30pm

Exhibition duration 26 June to 19 July 2026

AS SEEN ON TV (SKY Portrait Artist of the Year) - The wonderful Hannah Barker presents her solo exhibition Living Up To One's Teapot at Dry Water Arts Gallery.

Bringing together hand built ceramic novelty teapots, pastel portraits of family and friends, and new portrait works on ceramic, the exhibition explores memory, inheritance and resemblance through humour and domestic symbolism.

Barker’s interest in novelty teapots began when she inherited her Grandad’s collection. After his death, the teapots became a placeholder for his presence and playful spirit. Making in response to this loss has been a cathartic way of continuing his memory through material and form.

The works are displayed within a domestic setting, using furniture and staged arrangements that echo the home. Teapots are grouped thematically, such as toilet and sink or armchair and television. The pieces range from recognisably teapot sized objects to works that approach true life scale, including a sink rendered in the size and form of a teapot. By shifting scale and context, Barker transforms familiar household forms into affectionate caricatures.

Alongside the ceramics, Barker presents pastel portraits that serve as both remembrance and celebration. She builds layered colour slowly, blending pigment and drawing light back through erasure. This reflective process allows her to dwell on memory and attend closely to shared features and familial characteristics, with resemblance forming a quiet thread between generations.

New works combine portraiture and ceramics directly. Through underglazes, surface texture and the sheen of transparent glaze, Barker brings drawing and clay together in single objects, extending her exploration of how likeness can inhabit both image and form.

Humour runs throughout the exhibition. The teapots echo domestic appliances, furniture and even people, blurring object and character. For Barker, the teapot symbolises gathering, comfort and conversation, holding the rituals of shared time.

The exhibition title draws on a historical reference. It echoes an inscription by James Hadley of the Royal Worcester Porcelain Factory, itself thought to reference Oscar Wilde’s remark about “living up to my blue china”, a sentiment aligned with the ideals of the Aesthetic Movement. For Barker, the phrase suggests humour and ornament, but also the idea of living up to a family legacy, reflecting her themes of inheritance and belonging.

Barker holds an MFA from Northumbria University and Baltic 39 (2019). She has exhibited widely, with recent highlights including appearing as a contestant on Portrait Artist of the Year (Series 12), and being shortlisted for the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists Drawing Prize and the New Light Summer Exhibition of the North (2025). She was also the Judges’ Discretionary Prize Winner in the Woon Foundation Prize (2016)