Norah Braden

The Oxford Ceramics Gallery wrote:Norah Braden / 1901 - 2001
‘Norah was perhaps the most sensitive of all the students who have spent time at the Pottery’ Bernard Leach
Norah Braden studied painting at the Royal College of Art but switched to pottery under William State Murray. However, wanting to increase her knowledge and experience of studio pottery, she arrived at the Leach Pottery on the recommendation of Sir William Rothenstein, who said, 'I am sending you a genius. She had been inspired by Leach's work which she saw in an exhibition in London and persuaded him to take her on as a student in St Ives. Her contemporaries at that time were Michael Cardew and Katharine Pleydell-Bouverie.
The 1920s were an experimental era for the establishment of hand crafted pots. It was also unusual at the time for a woman to take up such a craft. Leach described Braden as one of the most gifted of potters. She was highly self-critical and because of Leach’s teaching of balance, the rim of the pot being right for the foot, and his belief in aesthetics, she became a hard judge of her efforts and destroyed much of her work. There is little evidence left of the pots she made in her time at the Leach Pottery although work is at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge and the V&A Museum, London.
A firm friendship developed between Pleydell-Bouverie and Braden and in 1928, when Pleydell-Bouverie set up a pottery on the the family estate at Coleshill in Berkshire,
Norah joined her. Together they worked on experimental glazes, using material gathered from the woods and surrounding countryside.
The two potters exhibited their work at the Little Gallery, London in 1929 and in Bond Street in 1930. The latter exhibition was singled out for praise in The Times, an achievement in itself since it was then unusual for potters to command critical acclaim.
In the 1950s Braden, with the onset of arthritis, ceased potting. She taught at Brighton and Chichester Colleges of Art, Sussex, and at Camberwell School of Art, London. In 1994 her own collection of forty pots went on sale at Bonhams.