Sam Hall was born in Shipley West Yorkshire. After initially training at Harrogate College of Art, Hall graduated in ceramics from Loughborough College of Art in 1990. Now based in Cornwall he has a studio near St.Ives.
Having exhibited extensively nationally and internationally he has gained a modest and appreciative audience over the last 30 years.
Hall’s self-referential pots and teabowls are the products of a conversation between himself and his studio. They are fragmentary documents of impulse let out into the world. Perhaps surprisingly, given this, there is a strong sense of place in his works. This is not allusion to the Cornish landscape or a specific coastline, but to the studio as the site of process. The interweaving of smooth and rough contours, of lucid and blurred textures, seem to speak of the ups and downs of process, of Hall’s “fight” – the word is written on the wall of his studio – to create. Though ceramic processes are always fraught with failure, Hall’s poetic work confirms that the kiln is, to quote Shakespeare, “a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.”