Mary Rose lives and works in The Forest of Dean in a house that has a studio and a gallery attached. She considered moving away in the 1970s after Art College, but her job working for Walkers Crisps in Leicester wasn’t quite tempting enough. So she moved back to the Forest and it was then she started making her attractive and brightly coloured pieces and going to a weekend market in Bristol to sell.
She is attracted to the humorous side of everything, and her pieces do have the unusual characteristic of making people smile as if they were looking at something intentionally funny. She also has an instinct for making her lines and shapes perfectly proportioned and unerringly pretty, while her ability to work with colours is second to none.
She built on her Bristol market visits by doing a Crafts Council Show in London in 1982. There she met two American Department stores who reacted quite differently to all her British customers, they were ecstatic, and suddenly Mary Rose had more demand for her pieces than she was able to cater to alone.
She had a team of 6 people by 1990 and was supplying a large number of galleries in the USA and also Germany Switzerland and Japan…life was busy and the demand did not wane as the years went by. She developed new designs and now found that she attracted quite a number of famous names who identified themselves as fans of her unique pieces.
She had decorated her house in the style of her pottery, painting stripes or roses or just highly improbable bright pinks and purples all over ceilings, furniture light switches and door handles. Interiors magazines were helplessly attracted to her style and her happy positive life.
She married in 1996, her husband was Phil Butcher, bass player extraordinaire who had worked with a number of bands in London. He moved to the Forest too and recorded an album by himself “Handy Hamburger” to which Mary Rose designed the sleeve.
Sadly Phil suffered a brain aneurysm in 1999 and never made a full recovery, so he has been house bound ever since. Fortunately Mary Rose too is house bound creating her fabulous art and so neither of them has suffered too much dislocation of lifestyle. Handy Hamburger is almost certainly Phil’s only album.
Her infectious enthusiasm has led to her embracing projects in as many disciplines as she can. For a while she decorated lavatories with her designs and fired them in her kilns to make the colour permanent, finding plenty of aficionados along the way who all thought that a hand painted toilet was the perfect addition to their country cottage. She designed ranges of pottery for other people to manufacture and sell which was a big success, most notably a range of name mugs marketed through gift shops by a company called Xpressions.She also decorated pieces of furniture both with her designs and with small ceramic flowers…the customers for these pieces were in America and transporting the work was surprisingly difficult. She then moved onto flat artwork and set her easel up in The Forest or in any holiday destination she chose, to create wonderful whimsical landscapes with charming little animals, gate posts and vehicles catching the eye of the beholder. She also embraced the whole genre of light fittings, throwing cup or teapot shaped lamp holders which sat upon irregular hand made beads to give a truly fairy tale look. The most well known of these have been her chandeliers.
In 2019 the dreaded lock down brought about the end of her working with a team and she returned to working alone. In 2020 Brexit completely finished her European market as orders that had sailed off to Germany or Italy suddenly incurred customs charges that increased prices so much that customers no longer wanted to buy. One does wonder quite how our entire population was fooled into voting for such a thing.
Now she works alone with her brother James and still welcomes all comers to her beautiful gallery. She still sends her work to dozens of galleries around the world and she still makes frequent Press appearances particularly showing photos of her fabulous colourful home. She now has a Self Catering Holiday Home just down the road which she has also decorated with her colours and her work so that customers can appreciate the whole 360 degree Mary Rose experience for themselves.