Mary White, née Rollinson, is a ceramic

Ceramic

A ceramic is an inorganic, nonmetallic solid prepared by the action of heat and subsequent cooling. Ceramic materials may have a crystalline or partly crystalline structure, or may be amorphous...

 artist

Artist

An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...

 and calligrapher

Calligraphy

Calligraphy is a type of visual art. It is often called the art of fancy lettering . A contemporary definition of calligraphic practice is "the art of giving form to signs in an expressive, harmonious and skillful manner"...

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She was born in 1926 in Croesyceiliog

Croesyceiliog

Croesyceiliog is a suburb of Cwmbran in the county borough of Torfaen, south Wales, United Kingdom.- Housing :Croesyceiliog is primarily a residential district and contains a wide variety of housing from Victorian terraces and even older Welsh cottages to property built between 1930 and 1970 and...

, Wales

Wales

Wales is a country that is part of the United Kingdom and the island of Great Britain, bordered by England to its east and the Atlantic Ocean and Irish Sea to its west. It has a population of three million, and a total area of 20,779 km²...

. From 1949-1950 she studied at Goldsmiths' College and in 1951 she married painter Charles White (d.1997). She was made a fellow of the Society of Scribes & Illuminators

Society of Scribes & Illuminators

The Society of Scribes & Illuminators is an organisation dedicated to the promotion and development of the arts of calligraphy and illumination....

 (SSI) in 1962 and later the Letter Exchange

Letter Exchange

Letter Exchange is a professional organization dedicated to the promotion of lettering in all media. Letter Exchange was founded in the United Kingdom in 1988. It organizes lectures held at the Art Workers Guild, publishes its journal Forum twice a year, and also organizes exhibitions...

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During the early 1970s she taught at Atlantic College

Atlantic College

The United World College of the Atlantic, also known as Atlantic College, is an international IB Diploma Programme boarding school in the United Kingdom. Founded in 1962, the school was the first of the United World Colleges and was among the first schools in the world to follow an international...

, Glamorgan.
After teaching for twenty years in Grammar Schools and Art Colleges and Atlantic College, she gave up teaching in 1973 to work freelance.

In 1975 she was invited to take part in an international symposium in Cardiff, Wales and had the opportunity to experiment with porcelain. She developed wide-flanged bowls, extending the thin rims to breaking point. She also found the possibilities of using colours in glazes instead of more usual warm browns that she had been using for tableware. This marked a great change in her work. turquoise became her favourite colour, at first pure, and then with subtle variations. She began to make more individual pieces and by the time she and her husband, painter, Charles White, moved to Germany in 1980 she rarely made tableware. In 1982 she was awarded the Staatspreis Rheinland-Pfalz for outstanding craftwork.

Before the move to Germany, Mary White had occasionally exhibited calligraphy with the SSI and had used letters on bowls, mainly painted in lustres. In Germany she could not find the market for these and at that time had no contact with German calligraphers so for many years she concentrated on ceramics. In the early 1980s Mary White began to make organic forms in porcelain, partly hand built. She used the clay as thin as possible, almost like torn paper and assembled it in layers,. Ideas come from the layers of rock on the seashore, shells and waves rippling over the sand and colours in the sea and sky. She prefers to make shapes that are oval rather than round. In 1990 she became involved with calligraphy again and attended an International symposium in Belgium. Under the influence of a master calligrapher, Villu Toots from Estonia

Estonia

Estonia , officially the Republic of Estonia , is a state in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland, to the west by the Baltic Sea, to the south by Latvia , and to the east by Lake Peipsi and the Russian Federation . Across the Baltic Sea lies...

, she regained her enthusiasm for calligraphy and now experiments with combining the two artforms.

Her work is collected internationally and appears in museum collections, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris.