Carol McNicoll, potter behind playful 1970s works like Three-Spouted Teapot and Unravelling Vase

Yahoo

08-03-2025

Carol McNicoll, who has died aged 81, was a pioneering studio potter whose witty, postmodern work transformed the ceramics scene in 1970s Britain.
She belonged to a cohort of women who studied at the Royal College of Art in London, including Alison Britton, Elizabeth Fritsch and Jacqueline Poncelet. Their work was a rejection of aesthetic and technical orthodoxies and became known as the 'New Ceramics'.
Instead of throwing tableware on the wheel or working in an abstract realm of 'pure' sculpture, Carol McNicoll made surreal slip-cast objects that straddled the sculptural and the functional. She treated ceramic history as a resource to be plundered, creating playful, often collage-like works. Sometimes these borrowings were literal, as in her Three-Spouted Teapot (1972), cast from obsolete moulds once used by Royal Staffordshire.
She subverted expectations of the material, casting crumpled paper, fans, flowers or tinfoil with liquid clay to create trompe l'oeil tableware. Other works were inspired by textiles: Unravelling Vase (1980) appears to unspool, ribbon-like. Tea sets were cast from folded fabric and bowls, while platters and bowls were handbuilt from 'woven' or 'knitted' strips of clay.
Alongside her studies, Carol McNicoll worked as a machinist for Zandra Rhodes. The fashion designer commissioned work from the student, including a set of pink coffee cups with hands for saucers. 'I'd give [Zandra Rhodes] a dinner service; she'd give me a frock,' she recalled.
In life as in art, she relished playful flamboyance. Her friends included Andrew Logan, the artist and founder of the Alternative Miss World competition, and the architect Piers Gough. In exchange for one of her tea sets, in 1980 Gough redesigned the flat in a former piano factory in Kentish Town, where she would live and work for the rest of her life.
While studying in Leeds, Carol McNicoll met Brian Eno, of the nascent glam-rock band Roxy Music. The pair had a five-year relationship, during which she designed stage outfits for Eno and his bandmate Andy Mackay – most memorably, Eno's high-camp cockerel-feathered outfit of 1972, which is now in the Theatre & Performance Collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum. Carol McNicoll is the only person with work in both the museum's theatre and ceramics collections. In 1973, she oversaw the cover design for Eno's debut solo album Here Come the Warm Jets, featuring a still-life photograph that includes one of her pieces.
Carol Margaret McNicoll was born on Christmas Eve 1943 in Birmingham to David McNicoll, a Scottish engineer who often worked abroad, and Brigit, née O'Keefe, an Irish Catholic from Co Waterford. Although her mother died when she was 13, Carol McNicoll credited her with her love of kitsch ornamentation, thanks to the neo-baroque churches they frequented together. To her father she attributed her fondness for knick-knacks, due to the many souvenirs he brought home.
After education at convent schools in Birmingham, Carol McNicoll studied for a degree in nutritional science at Solihull College of Technology but dropped out after a term. She found work as a wardrobe assistant at theatres in Birmingham and London in the early 1960s before doing a foundation course at Solihull College of Technology. She then studied fine art at Leeds Polytechnic from 1967 to 1970, focusing on film and pottery.
She applied to both the film and ceramics schools of the RCA and was awarded a Princess of Wales Scholarship to study in its School of Ceramics and Glass from 1970 to 1973. Her work was met with consternation by craft traditionalists, but found an influential champion in the newly formed Crafts Advisory Committee (now the Crafts Council).
In the 1980s her work became more geometric and abstracted, but it never abandoned its connection to function, however vestigial. She also dabbled in industrial design, producing ranges for Next Interiors with her friend Janice Tchalenko, and for Axis Diffusion.
Although brought up in a Tory household, from her teens Carol McNicoll was a committed Leftist and during the 2000s her work became increasingly political. From 2003 until 2011, her fury at the Iraq War found expression through pieces that satirised American military and consumer culture – casts of toy soldiers, guns and Coca-Cola bottles decorate her cake stands and coffee sets of the period.
Carol McNicoll was a lifelong collector of bric-a-brac, which she often cast to create composite artworks. She adored pattern and used both her own and commercially available transfers to decorate her work, alongside brushwork and sgraffito. 'I am entertained by making functional objects which are both richly patterned and comment on the strange world we have created for ourselves,' she said.
In 1999 the art historian Tanya Harrod described Carol McNicoll as 'easily the most creative person I know'. This creativity extended to her home, a shrine to maximalism, with walls, ceilings and surfaces heavily decorated. It was the subject of several magazine features, most recently in The World of Interiors (December 2024). Her personal sartorial style was equally exuberant, consisting of a riotous assemblage of charity-shop finds and homemade garments, always paired with her trademark oversized spectacles.
Carol McNicoll taught at Camberwell School of Art from 1985 until 2001, when she resigned in response to what she saw as the bureaucratisation of arts degrees. That same year, she was shortlisted for the Jerwood Prize for Ceramics. In 2002, with Jacqueline Poncelet, she co-curated 'Pattern Crazy', an exhibition at the Crafts Council's gallery. The New Walk Museum and Art Gallery in Leicester presented a major retrospective of her work in 2003.
Her work is held by public collections in Britain and worldwide, including the V&A, the British Museum and the Crafts Council in London, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
Carol McNicoll is survived by her son, Beckett Vester.
Carol McNicoll, born December 24 1943, died March 3 2025
Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.