Janice Tchalenko was born in Rugby, Warwickshire. She worked for a time as a civil servant at the Foreign Office before studying at Harrow College of Art, where she later taught. From 1981 to 1996 she taught for a time at the Royal College of Art, and was made a fellow in 1987. Tchalenko has acted as design consultant to the Dart Pottery and to a ceramics factory in Nanking in China. Tchalenko worked with model makers, Roger Law and Pablo Bach from The Spitting Image workshop, and at the Poole Pottery to produce a range of tableware.

Tchalenko’s early works were very much in the Leach tradition; a Crafts Council bursary in 1980 enabled her to experiment with bright surface decoration. The glazes are sponged, slip-trailed and painted in strong vivid colours; Tchalenko was originally hesitant about her painting skills but an exhibition with the textile designer, John Hinchcliffe, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, marked a turning point. Since then her colour palette has become increasingly rich and exuberant, and she has transferred these qualities to the small batch production works for the Dart and Poole Potteries making her work available to a wider public. She also experimented with three-dimensional decoration based on ideas from Bernard Palissy and 18th century naturalist earthenware of fruit and vegetable motifs.

 

Glossary

  • Ceramics

    Clay based products produced from non-metallic material and fired at high temperature. The term covers all objects made of fired clay, including earthenware, porcelain, stoneware and terra cotta.

  • Design

    The arrangement of elements or details in an artefact or a work of art.

  • Earthenware

    One of the three major types of pottery, the others being stoneware and porcelain. It is opaque, soft and porous unless covered completely with glaze. The firing temperatures can be low - 800ºC or high - 1200ºC, when it starts to vitrify, becoming stoneware.

  • Painting

    Work of art made with paint on a surface. Often the surface, also called a support, is a tightly stretched piece of canvas, paper or a wooden panel. Painting involves a wide range of techniques and materials, along with the artist's intellectual concerns effecting the content of a work.