Andrew Lord (artist)

In a 2010 monograph on the occasion of his exhibition at the Milton Keynes Gallery, Dawn Adès commented that his sculpture, informed by painting, ceramics, poetry, the natural world and the city,[3] exemplifies, "The centrality of material things to memory, experience, associations.

[1][2][3][4][7] His early influences were artists connected with the north of England; Henry Moore, the painter LS Lowry and the poet Ted Hughes, as well as the Lancashire landscape.

[3][14][15] In his final year at the Central School Lord travelled to Italy to study the works of the Della Robbia workshop [1][2][3][16] and in 1972 he was included in the exhibition "International Ceramics" at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

When a particular kind of light fell across a plate or vase I recorded it with brushstrokes I’d seen in paintings.”[3][19][20] His first solo exhibition, "Pottery," was held at Anthony Stokes Gallery, London in 1978,[22][23] installed on Barry Flanagan's Rowford Process furniture.

[3] Of the show, British art critic William Packer wrote, “Lord’s work is fraught with ambiguity; when does an object become still life and taking it a further step, when does still-life, that staple of painting, become sculpture?

His pieces are sculpture in that we can walk all around them, but fundamentally they are paintings.”[32] Reviewing his 2009 exhibition, Robert Pincus-Witten wrote, “His radical relocation of crafts to art means we now must judge his work as we do painting and sculpture.” [9] In a review in the New York Times of his 2014 exhibition at Gladstone Gallery, Ken Johnson wrote, “At once bracingly ugly and sensuously beautiful,[34] the recent ceramic sculpture by the British artist Andrew Lord look as if they’d been made by a clumsy but aesthetically sensitive giant.

Lord’s expressive, unconventional handling of the material made a lasting impression not just on de Pury, but also on a generation of artists who have taken up ceramics in the years since.