Design: Natural creativity takes wing

Marine life and birds are the inspiration for potter Ann Stokes. The result? Quirky, amusing and usable pieces. By Annabel Freyberg

If I'm not excited I can't work. I need to be at the peak of excitement," says the potter Ann Stokes. This summer she has been just that, creating a flood of fish dishes, reptile mirror surrounds, Moroccan lights, and tulip vases based on an 18th-century example she saw in an Italian church. Her whimsical ceramics, the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the Rebecca Hossack Gallery, are - like their maker - bright, effervescent and full of movement. Indeed many seem to have taken flight: eagles, owls and swans with wings outstretched. Startling in conception and ambitious in scale, they are of necessity made in sections in order to fit into the kiln.

Ann Stokes's oeuvre fits into no obvious category: she is neither simply studio potter, sculptor nor folk ceramicist. Along with birds, fish and animals, her leaf-printed plates, Cretan-style cups and saucers and casseroles in the shape of ducks are amusing, usable and idiosyncratic. Among the many people who have fallen for them over the past four decades are the decorator John Fowler, who became one of her first clients, the art historian David Sylvester, who favours her blue-and-white tableware, and the gallery owner Nigel Greenwood, who chose Stokes's work for the 1970 Hayward Open, where it must have sat cheerfully and curiously among more po-faced installations.

Stokes was a ballet dancer before she turned to clay. When she was 17 and living in St Ives the painter Adrian Stokes - later her husband - suggested she took up dance. She trained under Phyllis Badell, who had been evacuated to Cornwall, and performed every night at the local palais de danse, catching ringworm off the floor; Barbara Hepworth later turned the building into her studio and it is now a museum. In St Ives Ann naturally ran into Bernard Leach, the patron saint of potters, and was struck by how awful it must be to sit at a wheel all day.

It was only after several years of wartime signalling with the Wrens in Paris, Warrington and Aberdeen, and when her knee gave out, that she hung up her dancing shoes and got married. After the birth of her son, Philip, she discovered the Hampstead pottery run by Christopher Magarshak. In fact, Ann was no stranger to making things. "I was given a fretsaw at the age of eight, and carved animals such as horses at a hunt. At 12 I invented a spiral fretsaw that would go back and forth."

She started on wood again. At the pottery class, her son was put off when he found glass in the clay, but Ann was mesmerised by the sight of clay growing up on the wheel. Later, the Sudanese potter Mohammed Abdallah taught her to make coiled pots.

Gradually potting took over her life. At first she had to take her ceramics to a workshop to be fired and carry them back home again. Then she turned her ground-floor room into a studio, and used the wine cellar under the street to house a kiln. She started to fashion fountains and other objects bigger than herself. However, it was not till the painter and art critic Sir Lawrence Gowing surprised her by suggesting that her work would sell well - which she at first found most unflattering - that it occurred to her that others might be interested in buying her wares.

Thirty-six years ago she held her first Christmas sale, an event that has since turned into a crowded annual institution, with friends and customers fighting over jugs, tiles and mirrors as if it were a Harrods sale.

She relishes the challenge of new objects and commissions, and of devising ways to make something unlikely work: bird-of-paradise wall lights, a bluebird stool, a trireme shelf or a crocodile still life. Early on she began to frequent London Zoo, to try to capture the movement of birds and beasts. Her fascination for animals grew, she believes, out of her balletic background: "Every animal is a dancer. They couldn't slouch even if they wanted to."

Built into the uprights of her stairs is a series of tiles telling the story of two pigeons (ever versatile, she has also made a rich-hued stair carpet designed for her by the art historian John Golding; she stitched it while watching television plays). Fish also feature prominently in her work, from whopping piscatorial platters to three-dimensional dishes with spiny-finned lids. A striking recent invention is the hanging fish light, peppered with scale-like holes to let the light through; these look buoyantly surreal when suspended in mid-air. Next she plans to tackle a bat light, fashioning its "lovely umbrella-shaped" wings over a large wok to get just the right curve.

She spends half the year in Italy - till recently annually picking olives from 260 olive trees - with her second husband, Ian Angus, who this year celebrates an achievement of his own: the publication, after 15 years, of the complete works of George Orwell. The pottery she encounters in Italy has confirmed her preference for earthenware, which she has always used for her work. Ann insists that far more personality goes into earthenware than into the ubiquitous, less fragile stoneware which all her pupils - like most British potters - now use.

"It occurred to me when I was humming the song `Light and Lovely' the other day that that was what I ought to call my show," said Ann Stokes, laughing. "After all, I hate heavy pottery, and I can't open my mouth without using the word `lovely'."

Ann Stokes's exhibition is at the Rebecca Hossack Gallery, 35 Windmill Street, London W1, until 3 October, Mon-Sat 10am-6pm (0171-436 4899)