Object number
2010/112
Collection
Creator
Description
A stoneware bowl made by Ursula Mommens at her pottery in South Heighton, Newhaven East Sussex.
This small stoneware bowl was made by Ursula Mommens (1908–2010) at her pottery in South Heighton, near Newhaven East Sussex. It is a circular bowl which tapers down to a circular base and is greyish-white in colour. Ursula Mommens spent her life working as a potter. She was active in the London avant garde scene in the 1930s but by the 1960s she was producing functional stoneware tableware. This bowl was purchased from the South Heighton pottery in the late 1990s, before being acquired by the Museum.
Physical description
1 bowl, stoneware
Archival history
Collecting 20thc Rural Culture blog [Thursday, 8 July 2010] – 'Stoneware bowl by Ursula Mommens, c.1995 // I thought the project should include a piece by Ursula Mommens (1908-2010) who spent most of her long adult life - she died earlier this year aged 101 - as a potter. Her metropolitan cultural and artistic connections were impeccable but yet from a rural setting she dedicated herself to producing spirited but practical household wares. She was the great granddaughter of Charles Darwin and great great granddaughter of Josiah Wedgwood; her father, Bernard Darwin (1876-1961) was for fifty years golfing correspondent of The Times and Country Life; she studied at the Royal College of Art and, after setting up a studio near the Darwin home at Down in Kent, by the mid-1930s was active in the London avant garde art scene along with her first husband, the surrealist Julian Trevelyan. A spell working with the great slipware potter Michael Cardew set her on a new course of unpretentious and useful country ware and in 1951 she established a pottery with her second husband, the sculptor Norman Mommens, at South Heighton near Newhaven in Sussex where she remained for the rest of her life. After working initially in earthenware, stoneware became her principal medium from the 1960s, for sensitively decorated, soundly functional tableware.'
Production place
South Heighton
Object name
Material
Technique
Associated subject
