Jennifer Lee (b.1956) has a following of discerning admirers and private collectors; her pots are also found in many prestigious institutions. They are hand built, and she colours them by mixing metallic oxides into the clay before making. Creating is deceptively simple – there’s no glazing or use of the potter’s wheel. Starting with a pinch pot base, the piece is painstakingly constructed by hand by coiling lengths of clay and forming into unconventional contoured shapes. All this takes time, and Lee produces only a few pieces each year.

Magdalene Odundo (b.1950, Nairobi, Kenya) is recognised as one of the world's greatest contemporary ceramic artists. She moved to the UK in 1971 and has travelled widely to explore vernacular ceramic traditions. Her best-known pieces are hand-built using a coiling technique. The Fitzwilliam in Cambridge, Hepworth Wakefield, and Sainsbury Centre in Norwich have all recently held exhibitions of her work.

Deirdre McLoughlin, now based in Amsterdam, was born in Northern Ireland and studied for a degree in Humanities at Trinity College, Dublin, before discovering clay at the age of 22. She says, “I have called myself variously shapemaker, sculptor, visual artist – and I’ve heard myself say I work with mud. Privately I’ve sometimes thought of myself as an artist undercover." In 2011, one of her works featured on an Irish Post Office 'Year of Craft' postage stamp.

Alison Britton (b.1948) is a leading contemporary British potter with an international reputation. "Her distinctive sculptural works blur the line between art and craft. Works are hand-built from rolled slabs of clay, not thrown on a wheel. Surfaces are exuberantly covered with marks that refer to modern painting as much as the decorative patterns that tend to belong to craft." She is also a highly articulate writer on ceramics and craft; Seeing Things (2013, recently reissued by Occasional Papers), is a collection of her writing.  

Edmund de Waal summed up Lucie Rie's career and influence brilliantly on Front Row (he mentioned that her accent reminded him of his grandmother, Elisabeth de Waal). He also said that there are still too many talented female potters who deserve much greater recognition. So this week we celebrate five fine makers, starting with Katherine Pleydell-Bouverie 1895-1985, pictured in 1982), a pioneer of modern English studio pottery, known for her wood ash glazes.

The Kettle's Yard exhibition provides a survey of the different phases of Lucie Rie's long career. Although her style did not change significantly, the 1970s saw the introduction of sgraffito - fine lines drawn with a needle on the unfired clay - and greater experimentation with glazes and colours. This pink porcelain bowl dates from c1978 and is very similar to the last exquisite bowl in the exhibition, made when Lucie Rie was eighty-eight. She died at the age of ninety-three and left a phenomenal body of work.

Lucie Rie's studio and home at 18 Albion Mews near Marble Arch became a place of pilgrimage for collectors, curators and potters. She famously had the modern fittings and furnishings from her Vienna apartment which had been designed in 1928 by Ernst Plischke dismantled and shipped over to London where they were reassembled by Ernst Freud, son of Sigmund. She displayed her bowls and bottles in careful, thoughtful arrangements on the open shelves, as above.