[The Guardian] Love and obsession: how leading UK ceramics collection ended up in London council flat

Love and obsession: how leading UK ceramics collection ended up in London council flat

Michael Evans filled every available space with a treasure trove of British, French and Japanese works. Now they’re up for auction

Until recently, one of the best British postwar ceramics collections was to be found on a council estate in east London. “It was a bit like walking into a reliquary,” says the ceramicist Annie Turner, a regular visitor to the two-bed flat. “You’d go into a pretty brutal-looking 1970s building and up a dull concrete stairwell and think, ‘Am I in the right place?’. Then you opened this door, and it was like entering another world.”

Behind that very ordinary front door was a treasure trove. Mostly British, French or Japanese, around 1,200 ceramic works clustered on shelves, grouped on tables and desks, and even used as planters on the tiny balcony. Among the objects were key pieces by Lucie Rie and Edmund de Waal, and contemporary works by Turner herself, and Sara Flynn – two award-winning artists whose prices have recently risen sharply.

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Source: Love and obsession: how leading UK ceramics collection ended up in London council flat

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