Clarice Cliff, born 20 January 1899 in Meir Street in a modest terrace house, in Tunstall, Stoke-on-Trent, to parents Harry Thomas and Ann (née Machin) and died 23 October 1972.
She practiced the artform of ceramic artistry from 1922 to 1963 as a factory head of artistry department.
She attended a different school than her 6 siblings and visited an aunt after school that was a hand painter of pottery in a pottery factory and was quite good at making paper-mâché models in school.
She started assisting her aunt in the factory at the age of 13 by adding the gold lines on traditional pottery ware but soon changed her job to freehand painting after mastering the gilder job.
With this change, she also changed factories and studied art and sculpture at the Burslem School of arts in the evenings.
To improve her career opportunities she made the unusual decision to move to another factory in Newport in 1916.
Most of the women doing this type of work stuck to one artform to maximize their income but Clarice Cliff was very ambitious and started practicing and become skilled in modeling figurines, vases, gilding, outlining enameling (the actual art form of filling in colors within an outline) and banding (which is the painting of radial bands on plates and vessels) while keeping pattern and hand-painting ware books for inspiration.
In 1920 one of her decorating managers brought her to the attention of one of the factory owners that ran the company.
Though being seventeen years her senior, he took an interest in her romantically (even though he was married they became lovers and later ended up marrying each other) as well as in her artistic abilities and nurtured her skills, where she ended up at the Royal College of Art and to Paris, as well as given a second apprenticeship at the factory.
In 1924, at the age only 25, she was not only the primary modeler for the factory but worked with the factory designers, with over 20 years of experience, and produced the conservative styled Victorian Ware.
Given her own studio in 1927, she started her own form of glazing by using on-glaze enamel colors instead of underglazing colors and used triangles in small patterns to cover the small imperfections, in a style which she called “Bizarre” which later became her signature form of work and even started undersigning the items with the signature, “Hand Painted Bizarre by Clarice Cliff, Newport Pottery England.
Even after she passed away in 1972 her popularity in her way of designing pottery and painting remained and in 1982 they even started a club, Original Clarice Cliff Collectors Club, after finding ex work colleagues(known as Bizarre Girls) to fill in the gaps of her work life.
These clubs visited all across England and even to Australia, New Zealand and North America
