Dave / David Cohen, Scotland, Kc mark

here is a vase bought today

seller said it was by David Burrell Scottish but Im not sure

any idea


sorry for bad images taken at nigh

I think your looking at it upside down to me, it looks like D Cohen. David Cohen is a Scottish potter, but doesn't look typical of his current work.

looked up sig SIG AND IT IS INDEED d Cohen _ SIGNATURE NOW REVERSED

It's Dave Cohen's mark used at Juniper Green, Edinburgh. He's now in East Lothian doing very different work.

Dave Cohen was born in America, but almost all his pottery life was spent in Scotland, as a student, teacher, and professional craft potter. He was a great potter, very productive, and I'm amazed how little there is about him on this forum. He died in 2018, but the Tantallon Studios he founded in North Berwick continue. There's a really good biography, with timelines, videos and pictures on mostly more recent pots, on their website: https://tantallonstudios.co.uk/david-cohen/ The pottery illustrated on these web pages shows his more sculptural later output, rather than his more traditional earlier pots.

His 1960s pottery often used heavily grogged stoneware clay, and he provided this as a raw material for Katie Horsman's "Wednesday Evening" pottery group where a group of he pottery friends would gather to chat and make pots together. My dad (although an amateur potter) made some fine pots with Dave Cohen's distinctive clay.

Here's one of his distinctive earlier stoneware bottles - (pretty sure from the 1960s or early 70s), which belonged to my my parents.  I love the conical stopper, with string binding, which I remember vividly from when I was wee.

PS I forgot to inlcude a scalebar - the bottle with stopper in is 23cm high.

Here's a couple of similar David Cohen bottles in Paisley Museum's excellent studio pottery collection, photographed on display in 2005. They have 1964 dates in their museum accession numbers, supporting an early 1960s date for their production...

I love the way that the Scottish potters are identified but I suspect that Beano would have been very annoyed about the spelling of her first name, Katharine. She was always insistent that it had 2 As without even considering the C word (Catherine).