Carol McNicoll, who has died aged 81, belonged to a remarkable cohort of female students who graduated in the early 1970s from the School of Ceramics and Glass at the Royal College of Art, then run with benign genius by David Queensberry, with Hans Coper and Eduardo Paolozzi as tutors.
McNicoll, along with Glenys Barton, Alison Britton, Jill Crowley, Elizabeth Fritsch and Jacqui Poncelet, offered a series of unsettling postmodern objects that reflected on the long history of the vessel, playing wittily with industrial processes and with historic source material.
McNicoll’s contribution was dazzling from the start. She argued early on that a domestic setting was a “truly revolutionary area to work in”. While still a student she made an Alice in Wonderland tea-set for the artist Peter Blake and a “cushion” dinner service, cast from plaster-filled bags, for the fashion designer Zandra Rhodes (a devoted collector of her work).
Her vases, cups, lights and plates were slip-cast from liquid clay, often cast directly from flowers, fans, leaves or folded tinfoil. Each piece was decorated with pattern, whether as brushwork or sgraffito, while industrial ceramics were a resource to be quoted and cannibalised ironically. Sent to the Royal Staffordshire factory in Stoke-on-Trent by Queensberry, McNicoll returned with obsolete moulds and transfers, and went on to produce extraordinary flights of collage in which everyday objects were given a surreal twist – there were teapots through which flew giftware birds, and cups cast in stacks of three. Her jugs, alarmingly, appeared to unfurl.
In the 1980s McNicoll’s work became intensely fashionable, appearing on record covers and in a commercial for Maxell tapes. Her designs were produced in multiples by Rising Hawk Pottery with Christopher Strangeways, for Axis Diffusion in Paris and, most notably, for Next Interiors, in 1985-86.
Her studio work became more complex and sculpture-like – a slab of clay was cut and folded to create a tower holding an angled cylinder, a series of bowls were made by stacking horizontally the same cast curved elements.
Visits to India in the early 1990s returned McNicoll to function, and to still more complex surface decoration. She began to draw, and transferred details from her remarkable travel sketch books on to her pots. Her last show, held at Marsden Woo in 2019, used affordable digitally made transfers on a series of elegiac plates that memorialised the death of friends – the journalist Michele Hanson and fellow ceramicist Janice Tchalenko.
From the late 90s McNicoll cast from mass-produced souvenirs acquired in charity shops. A plastic turbaned figure was one find, cast in triplicate and set to work holding cast grapes. The figures were covered with vine leaf transfers, mingling the familiar tropes of the bourgeois souvenir – the vine leaf, the colonial memento, the grapes and a hint of an Edwardian cake stand. A carved teak giraffe, east African airport art, was cast in multiples to hold a glass bowl, a playful comment on the subaltern’s role within empire. After the millennium her work became increasingly political.
In Freedom and Democracy (2011), ceramic figures of soldiers sit on an aluminium plate, shouldering Coca-Cola bottles wired to form a fruit bowl. “There is no political party that I can support ... So I started to think I may as well say it on the pots!” She used the term knick-knacks to describe her work, and advocated a form of high unseriousness while simultaneously investigating the dark side. Tensions in the Middle East, the fall-out from empire, the petrochemical industries and corporate culture were transformed into ornament.
Carol was born in Birmingham. Her father, David McNicoll, was a Scottish engineer who could draw beautifully, was good at making things and who gardened obsessively. Her mother, Brigit (nee O’Keefe), who died when Carol was 13, taught her to sew and make clothes; an Irish Catholic from County Waterford, Brigit insisted on a Catholic upbringing for her daughter, which, even in Birmingham, was “like a lens into European baroque”. When Carol travelled with her parents round Europe, her mother, guidebook in hand, took her into churches whose dark, incense-laden interiors remained with her.
The family home was filled with carved furniture and good rugs brought back by her father from India. Years later, in 1972, she went to the Islamic carpet exhibition at the Hayward organised by David Sylvester. It was a prescient show, put on at a time when decoration and decorative were damning words in the art world. A year later McNicoll began to use pattern, starting with some bowls that looked like trompe l’oeil rugs folded into shape.
Convent schooling was followed by a term of nutritional science at Solihull College of Technology while making costumes for the Birmingham Rep and for Joan Littlewood’s theatre at Stratford East in London. McNicoll responded positively to ideas about the democratisation of art when she attended Leeds Polytechnic (now Leeds Beckett University) in the late 60s. She and three others directed a film called Musical, involving the whole of the art school in a Busby Berkeley-inspired send-up of the genre.
Painting and sculpture appeared to have run out of steam and McNicoll turned to making ceramics. Fashionable Duchampian nihilism was replaced by making, inspired by Japanese oribe wares and 18th-century European ceramics seen in the Victoria and Albert Museum – faience asparagus plates, the lacy beauties of Meissen porcelain and English soft-paste porcelain formed into shell jugs, leafy teapots and plaice sauce boats. At her degree show at Leeds she showed the slip-cast Chops, Chips and Peas with Tomatoes, a set of containers whose lids imitated food – much admired by the external examiner Patrick Heron.
In 1970, enrolled with a scholarship at the RCA, she was living with Brian Eno, whom she met while she was at Leeds. Eno joined Roxy Music in 1971 and she was the creator of his black feather stage costume, now in the V&A.
She worked intermittently for Zandra Rhodes, meeting another employee, Piers Gough, who subsequently bought and later commissioned work including The Architect’s Tea-Set of 1984. Gough later designed her flat at Apollo Works, a former piano factory in north London, with a curving wall, gleaming flexible exposed ducting, monumental cast-iron Victorian radiators, pastel bathrooms suites and eclectic tiling.
McNicoll created a second remarkable home in the building’s basement, a scaled-up extension of her collaging, salvaging and pattern-making activities. Her obsession with the last of these was set out in the extraordinary show Pattern Crazy, co-curated at the Crafts Council in 2002 with her RCA contemporary Poncelet.
If her work and home were visually arresting, so was McNicoll herself. Tall, slender and boyishly good-looking, she was a walking work of art who acquired most of her clothes in charity shops, collaging her finds to create outfits of unusual elegance, and was frequently stopped in the street by youthful admirers.
An inspiring teacher at Camberwell School of Art from 1985, she left abruptly in 2001, disappointed by the audit culture taking over higher education. Well-read, discerning and argumentative (she enjoyed lively combative discussions with her son, Beckett), politically ranged left, she was a free spirit, strikingly loyal and straightforward, unfailingly kind to friends in need.
Her works are to be found in many public collections, notably the Crafts Council, the Hepworth Wakefield and the V&A. Her life is documented in an interview for National Life Stories at the British Library. A generous selection of her work, together with the recreation of part of her flat and studio, will form a section of a museum of ceramics due to be opened in Ipswich, Suffolk.
She is survived by Beckett, her son from a relationship with Paul Vester, and her grandson, Leonard.
• Carol Margaret McNicoll, ceramic artist, born 24 December 1943; died 2 March 2025
