Her story
A life studied in clay
Merrinda Lissaman has spent a lifetime in clay. After six years of formal training, she read Glass and Ceramics at Sunderland Polytechnic before completing a Master of Arts in Ceramics at Cardiff College of Art — a grounding that still shapes the quiet assurance of everything she makes.
For more than thirty years she carried that discipline into the NHS, first as a pottery and woodwork technician on a psychiatric unit and later as a qualified occupational therapist. The work left her with an enduring conviction: that making by hand is restorative, grounding, and profoundly human.
Today she works from a studio at home, moving between the wheel and hand-building. Her recent work turns to the human form — a series of busts and larger sculptural pieces marked by the same honesty of material and surface that runs throughout her practice. Alongside her own making, she teaches one-to-one sessions, small workshops, and group work.