Philip Eglin | Bucket List

Canopy Collections is delighted to present Bucket List, an exhibition of ceramics by Philip Eglin (b. 1959) made between 2007 and 2025. It is the artist’s first show with the gallery.

The title Bucket List points to both accumulation and aspiration – the desire to experience, to possess, to leave a mark – while alluding to the impermanence that underpins those impulses. The exhibition surveys the vessel forms that Eglin has explored over the past three decades: jugs and handled jars, large chargers, and straight-sided Buckets – a term he coined as an irreverent send-up of the generic Untitled Vessel often used to title non-functional ceramics.

Eglin’s work moves between sincerity and satire. Collage-like surfaces draw on a deliberately eclectic range of sources: art history and ceramic tradition sit alongside references to consumer culture, sport, religion and contemporary morality. Pieces carry fragments of text borrowed from advertising, graffiti or everyday speech, while sketch-like figures range from priests and Madonnas to sex workers and sports stars. His work holds opposites in tension: the ancient and the modern, the sacred and the profane, the sophisticated and the crude.

Across the exhibition, familiar objects and figures are seen askew. People appear with pomposity either punctured or comically enhanced – footballers celebrating a goal are given all the gravitas of a biblical scene. Humour is central to Eglin’s approach, used to draw viewers into reflections on ambition, excess, vulnerability and mortality. The surfaces of his hand-built ceramics are animated by slips, glazes and transfers, while their forms are sometimes punctuated with press-moulded details taken from the debris of domestic life, textures cast from a tin can or a plastic bottle.

Eglin’s practice is rooted in his engagement with art history. His research into ceramics collections prompted an interest in English folk slipware traditions of the 17th to 19th centuries, which inspired his fluid abstract mark-making with slip, while the influence of English medieval pottery is visible in a series of small jugs. The style of Chinese blue-and-white export porcelain can be seen reflected in certain surface designs, while the drug jars of Renaissance Italy inspire his rounded handled forms. The exhibition features one such jar, animated by bold, gestural brushwork: Rosso (2024), which earnt Eglin a place on the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize shortlist in 2025. All the while, these works remain firmly grounded in the present. As art historian Paul Greenhalgh has noted, Eglin’s work exemplifies a ‘ceramic continuum’, collapsing distinctions between past and present, fine and decorative art, reverence and irreverence.

Bucket List is an encounter with a practice that remains playful, incisive and intellectually generous – one that openly borrows, steals and recombines, while resisting solemnity or fixed moral positions. It presents ceramics as a site of narrative, humour and critical reflection, and affirms Eglin’s position as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary British ceramics.

– Text by Isabella Smith

Philip Eglin studied ceramics at Staffordshire Polytechnic in Stoke-on-Trent and the Royal College of Art in London. He lives and works in the Swansea valley in Wales. His work is held in international public and private collections, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh; the British Council; Musée de la Céramique, Sèvres; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museum of Fine Art, Houston, Texas; The Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina. He has exhibited at the V&A, London; The Royal Academy, London; Somerset House, London; Marsden Woo Gallery, London; Yorkshire Sculpture Park; Pallant House Gallery, Chichester; Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, Madrid. He was awarded the Jerwood Prize for Applied Arts in 1996 and the Wakelin Award in 2017. In 2025, he was shortlisted for the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize. 

Philip Eglin | Bucket List 
15 January—20 February 2026 
Private View: Thursday 15 January, 6—8pm
Canopy Collections HQ 
3 Bloomsbury Place 
London WC1A 2QA 

DISCOVER THE ARTIST