Lubna Chowdhary
1964
Lubna Chowdhary was born in Tanzania in 1964. Her Pakistani parents migrated in the UK and settled in the north of England in 1970. Her upbringing was traditional Asian and working class and her parents started their own business selling western clothes.
Creating tile-based artworks for clients around the world to design interior and exterior spaces is her main work. Some of her impressive and varied clients, nationally and internationally, are the BBC, Conran and Partners, a bakery in Los Angeles and Itsu Restaurant in Chelsea. Each piece Chowdhary creates it is unique modular compositions of colour, texture and pattern which is purely for a certain purpose. Lubna creates all of her work by hand, “The particular quality of ceramics is the immediate and direct relationship between the human hand and the material which enables you to mould it without the use of tools”. A variety of precisely controlled hand-glazing techniques are used to create work, an infinite palette of glaze colours are hand blended and hand painted onto ceramic elements each of which undergoes numerous glaze firings before taking its place in a final composition.
Chowdhary received First Class Honour BA Degree in Design in wood, metal and ceramics from Manchester Metropolitan University. Then she went to the Royal College of Art where received a travel scholarship to India, this visit influenced Chowdhary and her work. Eventually, Chowdhary graduated from RCA and gained MA in Ceramics in 1991.