Lydia Hardwick is a ceramicist living and working in Cumbria. Inspired by folk tradition and ancient making methods, she uses surface techniques such as inlaying and slip decorating to create patterned ceramics that appeal to the viewer’s visceral senses.
Lydia Hardwick graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2013. Primarily working with clay, her practice spans across the fields of art and design. From tableware to densely patterned pots, Hardwick’s work appeals to the viewer’s visceral senses. Using surface techniques such as inlaying and slip decorating, her working methods are meditative and intuitive.
Lydia is drawn to patterns and motifs found within archaic craft objects and textiles, made by communities that attributed great expressive power to visual things. Intrigued by the mysterious formal vocabulary of folk tradition, she produces work that aims to reconnect us to an ancient appreciation of line, surface, tone and texture as presences unto themselves.
Having spent most of her life living and working in suburban London and Essex, she relocated to Cumbria in 2024. Recent making projects aim to illustrate her journey into reconnecting with the land and skies. Through pattern and clay she attempts to rekindle a ritualistic and deep somatic understanding of the natural world, counteracting the grief felt at our severing from this type of knowledge.
In 2016 the Victoria and Albert Museum purchased one of her designs for their permanent collection. As an artist educator, she has undertaken educational projects with the Royal Academy of Arts, Whitechapel Gallery, Camden Arts Centre and Turner Contemporary.
