Description
‘Rose Vase’ Brooch
Collect from gallery £38
Including UK deliver £45
H 8.7 x W 4.4 x D 0.6 cm
Hand made at Mary Rose Young’s pottery.
Mary Rose lives and works in The Forest of Dean. She considered moving away in the 1970s after Art College, but her job working for Walkers Crisps in Leicester wasn’t quite tempting enough. So she moved back to the Forest and it was then she started making her attractive and brightly coloured pieces and going to a weekend market in Bristol to sell. She is attracted to the humorous side of everything, and her pieces do have the unusual characteristic of making people smile as if they were looking at something intentionally funny. She also has an instinct for making her lines and shapes perfectly proportioned and unerringly pretty, while her ability to work with colours is second to none. She built on her Bristol market visits by doing a Crafts Council Show in London in 1982. There she met two American Department stores who reacted quite differently to all her British customers, they were ecstatic, and suddenly Mary Rose had more demand for her pieces than she was able to cater to alone.
She had a team of 6 people by 1990 and was supplying a large number of galleries in the USA and also Germany Switzerland and Japan…life was busy and the demand did not wane as the years went by. She developed new designs and now found that she attracted quite a number of famous names who identified themselves as fans of her unique pieces. She had decorated her house in the style of her pottery, painting stripes or roses or just highly improbable bright pinks and purples all over ceilings, furniture light switches and door handles. Interiors magazines were helplessly attracted to her style and her happy positive life.
She married in 1996, her husband was Phil Butcher, bass player extraordinaire who had worked with a number of bands in London. He moved to the Forest too and recorded an album by himself “Handy Hamburger” to which Mary Rose designed the sleeve. Sadly Phil suffered a brain aneurysm in 1999 and never made a full recovery, so he has been house bound ever since. Fortunately Mary Rose too is house bound creating her fabulous art and so neither of them has suffered too much dislocation of lifestyle. Handy Hamburger is almost certainly Phil’s only album.
