Obituary: Tatiana Best-Devereux

Tatiana Best-Devereux, potter, glassmaker and teacher: born London 1 October 1958; married 1989 Hamish Gaunt (one daughter); died Redhill, Surrey 25 June 1993.

TATIANA BEST-DEVEREUX was a young British glass artist of originality and promise with a string of achievements behind her and the promise of much more to come.

She had the rare gift of being both a potter and a glassmaker, combining these skills to produce a series of sculptural forms where glass and clay enjoyed a harmonious and fruitful relationship. A strong sense of form and an instinctive feeling for the materials she used resulted in a series of pieces, produced mostly during the 1980s, in which cast glass nestled in clay forms tailored to enfold them. To quote her own words, she saw her work as 'observations and statements about the movement of light around forms'.

After doing a course in 3D design at Middlesex Polytechnic (1978-81), she studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. Her teacher, the Dutch glass artist Mieke Groot, described her as 'full of life, somebody who really took up everything inside her'.

After completing her studies in Holland she returned to London, making work that was seen in exhibitions throughout Europe, as well as in Japan. Examples are to be found in the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Lausanne, and the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague.

A sense of reality pervaded her life and work, leading her to do a secretarial course which in turn led to various jobs in television, among other things, as a picture researcher for Angela Carter on The Holy Family Album (1991), in Channel 4's 'Without Walls' series. But she was equally proud of a stint cooking for a team of sheep shearers in Australia during a visit there with her husband in 1990- 91. Her approach to everything was refreshing and without frills.

In 1986 she was invited to be Artist in Residence at CIRVA (Centre Internationale de Recherche sur la Verre) in Marseilles and to the International Glass Symposium at Novy Bor in Czechoslovakia in 1989. As an artist her output was not prolific, but she only produced work if she felt she had a statement worth making.

Last year she began teaching ceramics at Salisbury College of Art and Design, and had also just begun lecturing in the glass department for the 3D Degree Course at West Surrey College of Arts and Design. The most recent exhibition to include her work was the Crafts Council's 'Contemporary British Glass', seen in London at the beginning of this year and now touring the country. Her main work in this exhibition is a blue cone in cast glass held in a soaring arc of baroque inspiration.

(Photograph omitted)