After studying painting, printmaking, and ceramics at St Luke's College Exeter, Ian Harris went on to teach ceramics and sculpture for many years at schools in Essex, Kent, and Dorset. He now lives and works in the beautiful village of Corfe Castle, at the heart of the Isle of Purbeck, in Dorset. His studio, in a wonderfully atmospheric 18th Century Blacksmith's Forge, (complete with original hearth, bellows, and anvil) is situated just 150 yards up from the Village Square, and here you can see the pots being made aswell as buy the finished work diectly from the potter.

Over the past forty years he has been honing and developing a unique range of handbuild designs in stoneware, porcelain and raku all based on his observations of natural forms. Every piece is indiviually created. Improvising around a theme he uses objects such as beach pebbles, sea shells and seed pods as his initial inspiration. The curved organic forms that he creates are futher enhanced by the use of texture and metal oxides rubbed into the surface of the clay.

Recent work has included a series of coiled bowls echoeing the rythms and shapes of the dorset landscape, together with delicate porcelain pinch bowls based on the growth ridges of oyster shells dug up in his garden, just below the castle these were proberly a soilders meal during the Civil War!!!

Aswell as his new work being continually shown at the studio, he has had gallery exhibitions throughout the south, and sells regulary at large potters markets around the country.

His work has gone to private collections in America, New Zealand, South Africa, Switzerland, Germany and Holland.