Philip Eglin is a ceramicist whose work reflects and comments on contemporary culture. Eglin references are wide spanning international folklore, cultural icons, and symbols used on packaging and the underside and backs of objects. This interest in everyday-use objects also manifest as moulds used in his pieces. He works on a range of scales in earthenware and stoneware from small functional vessels to large figurative, sculptural works
Madonna and Child depicts the Christian Virgin Mary and her infant son Jesus Christ - in a common motif where Mary is holding Jesus in her arms. This work features transfer-printed images over the ceramic figure of other poses the Madonna and Child have taken in art history, for example with different proportions or with and without halos.
The Williamson Art Gallery and Museum has an important ceramics collection – it houses the largest public collection of Della Robert Pottery as well as Liverpool porcelain, nineteenth- and twentieth-century art pottery, and more contemporary studio ceramics. They are currently working on a project to refresh and reinterpret their ceramics display, relating the ideology which drove the ‘arts and crafts’ movement to the subjects of contemporary ceramics.
