The inspiration of Marianne de Trey – necessity and decoration from cloth to clay
Marianne de Trey (1913–2016) successfully ran a small pottery at Dartington in Devon for over three decades from the late 1940s, crafting repeat lines of domestic wares. Throughout this era de Trey prepared individual work in parallel to the production side and in 1980 she retired to concentrate on personal, one-off work. In the 1940s and 50s she was closely involved with some major figures and events of British studio pottery, and became a founding member of the Devon Guild of Craftsmen, which has grown into a major support network for the regional crafts. In 2004 the Crafts Study Centre received a gift from de Trey of a selection of pots spanning her career, alongside examples of her student work made in printed textiles at the Royal College of Art in the 1930s, and textiles from her own ‘source collection’. Funding from the Headley Trust c.2004 led to the production of a digital resource which examines this gift in more detail, and the themes of pattern and decoration which emerge as a central preoccupation of de Trey’s creative work.
