CERAMICIST Simon Carroll, a former Hereford Sixth Form college and HCA student, has a retrospective display of his unique work on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum until early next year.

An unconventional and adventurous artist, Simon Carroll produced some of the most singular and extraordinary ceramics of recent years.

Characterised by extremes in the handling of clay and by bold and vigorous mark-making, his pottery has an affinity with abstract expressionism. The first retrospective of Carroll’s work, the display provides a celebration of the artist’s life and creativity following his untimely death in 2009 at the age of 45.

Carrol fell into ceramics almost by chance, when he went to Hereford COllege of Arts to do a foundation course. "I didn't really know why I was there to be honest," he said in an interview with Moira Vincentelli, curator of the Ceramics Collection at Aberystwyth University. It was Clive Hickinbottom, who had arrived at HCA in the mid-80s who suggested he try ceramics and so he went on to do a degree at Bristol University, where he did a lot of painting as well as ceramics.

In the early 90s, through a friend working in the art department at the Royal National College for the Blind, Carroll went to help out and became fascinated by the instinctive way the students worked with clay to make vessels or figurative work. Until that point he had thought life was going in another direction altogether, as he told Moira Vincentelli: "I was cutting grass, and living in caravan in the middle of the horse yard. During that time I didn’t think I was going make art again, because I found myself getting into this way of living really which was just cutting grass, going up the local - and that’s what I became."

Shortly after re-connecting with clay at RNC, he discovered slipware and went to Stoke to learn more. A Crafts Council grant helped him secure his first studio - an old Nissen hut on a disused airfield in Cornwall, where he would make giant sand paintings on the deserted beaches.

His resistance to the conventional was eloquently demonstrated at the Aberystwyth International Ceramics Festival in 2003 when Martin Lungley, a fellow potter, literally threw a crown of clay on Carroll's head, and in 2004 he was awarded the Arts Foundation Prize.

The display of Simon Carroll's work, in Ceramics, Rom 146, at the V&A, runs until Sunday, January 4, 2015.