Inside the world of contemporary ceramics devotee Marijke Varrall-Jones
Spend any time with Marijke Varrall-Jones and it is impossible not to be drawn in by her love of contemporary ceramics. On a visit to the south London studio of Julian Stair - a leading British potter, whose work Marijke has sold over the past 10 years - she appears animated when he offers to show her his archive of work stored at the back of the studio. Soon the pair are enthusiastically discussing the roles played by the 20th-century potters Bernard Leach and William State Murray in British studio pottery.
Marijke is a trailblazer in her field, having launched Maak, the first auction house dedicated to contemporary ceramics, in 2009. Towards the end of last year, she added craft auctions to its offering, kicking off with Heritage in Contemporary Craft, a sale of over 100 pieces in wood, metal, glass, lacquer and ceramics from the collection of the late Victoria, Lady de Rothschild, which was exhibited at Ascott House. her former home in Buckinghamshire.
Marijke, who grew up in Surrey, might not have ended up in the art world had it not been for a chance encounter at a party in the summer after her A levels. 'I was chatting with the fine art auctioneer John Nicholson and he offered me an admin job over the summer,' she recalls. 'It was my first exposure to anything like that.' At the time, it was no more than a holiday job and, after her short stint, she moved to Ghent (her mother is Dutch and she is fluent in Flemish) to start a degree in veterinary medicine. After a year and a half, however, she found herself so drawn to the auction world that she left her course and returned to work for John Nicholson for a few months, before enrolling on a degree in Fine and Decorative Arts at Sotheby's Institute of Art in London. By this point, she had also met her now husband Will Varrall, who today works as strategic land director for Nicholas King Homes.
'It was during my time at Sotheby's I realised I wanted to specialise in 20th-century decorative art and design,' she recalls. In 2004, she got a job in the contemporary ceramics department at Bonhams. When her boss Ben Williams left in 2007, Mariike took over as head of contemporary ceramics - a short-lived experience due to the financial crash of2008, when Bonhams decided to close the department. 'I had a lovely mix of naivety, optimism and nothing to lose,' admits Mariike, when asked how she chose what to do next. 'I felt I had an opportunity to carry on doing what I loved.' She also realised there was potential for a new business: 'After Bonhams closed, there was no one else specialising in pots in the secondary market.'
She and Will came up with the name Maak - 'to make in Dutch - in a pub near their home in Putney. By June 2009, she was organising her first online ceramics auction, working with Auction Atrium, a small London-based company that was ahead of the curve in terms of getting people to bid online. Over the next 18 months, Mariike ran seven Maak auctions as a consultant under the Auction Atrium banner. She soon realised that she wanted to have more autonomy and decided to build her own platform. "There was no software that met my needs, unless I wanted to sell alongside tractors and industrial machinery.' she says. She teamed up with a friend who worked for a bespoke software company and they developed a platform. Now, as well as running Maak, Marijke is a tech entrepreneur and founding director of Rostrum, which allows customers to run live and timed auctions under their own label.
Thankfully, her new auctions were successful from the outset. Private collectors were relieved that an expert in the field had created a platform tailored to contemporary ceramics and a flurry of bidding reflected this. One of the early supporters was modern ceramics collector and potter Ben Baglio, whom Marijke met in 2009 when she was guest lecturer on Sotheby's MA in Contemporary Design. He has bought several pieces from Maak auctions, including a vast work by Ewan Henderson and a set of 12 cylinder vases by Rupert Spira. Ben credits Maak with helping the work of potters John Ward and Akiko Hirai thrive on the secondary market. 'It's largely because of Maak's careful shepherding of the pieces that come up for resale, which has resulted in phenomenal increases in their auction prices.' he says.
Alongside developing Maak, Marijke and Will have been raising their two boys, Dexter, 13, and Bastie, 11. When she held the first auction using her own software in May 2011, Marijke was eight months pregnant. For the next seven years, Maak was a solo enterprise, with Will helping when he could in the evenings. This organic growth worked well with family life; the boys are hugely respectful of her own collection of ceramics and craft pieces, which are beautifully displayed around their home. Their friends are briefed not to throw anything in the house, and Dexter has earned holiday pocket money by helping catalogue the Maak library. Since 2015, the family has lived not far from Henley. Will and Mariike both grew up in the countryside and wanted to give their boys a similar childhood.
After years of working from home, Marijke took on an office locally, not long before one of the lockdowns. This decision was precipitated by the need to have access to the pots while the specialist London storage facility that she used was forced to closed its doors. And thank goodness she did: the May 2021 auction attracted Maak's highest ever level of new registrations. 'It was such a strange period for everyone, but many of us suddenly had more time than ever to be online looking for new things', she says. 'Something about ceramics hugely resonated with people. It's that sense of engagement with physical objects that come from the earth, handmade by one human, which you can hold within your hands.'
The offices are in a converted farm building a few miles from the family home and Mariike now has a team of five. Maak holds up to five auctions each year, some featuring 400 or more pots. This autumn it will be presenting Contemporary Ceramics (November 16-21) and Ceramic Art of the East (November 16-20) auctions. Both will be exhibited at the Earlham Street gallery in Covent Garden, allowing potential buyers to see the pieces first hand.
Mariike talks about the thrill she still feels on discovering an amazing piece and when presenting important works at auction. 'It's exciting when you set a world record for an artist, which we've done many times,' she says. In 2020, Maak sold Magdalene Odundo's Angled Mixed Coloured Piece for £240,000; at the time, this was highest price paid for a single work by a living ceramic artist.
In September 2022, Mariike set up the Maak Foundation - a charitable initiative providing grants to promote studio ceramics through supporting research, non-commercial exhibitions or the publication of books. The first of these was Emma Crichton-Miller's 2022 monograph on British studio potter John Ward, who died in 2023; the second, in May 2024, was a monograph covering 50 years of Julian Stair's work. With the addition ofcroft auctions and a growing team, Mariike's success is testament to the belief that if you do something you love, the rest will follow O
Maak: maaklondon.com
Tom Griffiths1/11Marijke examining a small bowl by Lucie Rie with client Robin Cawdron-Stewart in the gallery in Earlham Street, WC2, where Maak exhibits in advance of its auctions to allow potential buyers to view pieces in person before bidding
Tom Griffiths2/11Fleur Manning (left), Maak's cataloguer, and Frances Robinson, the senior specialist and head of sales, look for literary references to pots in a private collection to be offered in a forthcoming auction
Tom Griffiths3/11A group of Morandi Bottles by Akiko Hirai are displayed on the mantelpiece in Mariike and Will's bedroom
Tom Griffiths4/11Gordon Baldwin's Crucible with Black Rectangles stands next to a tea bowl by Claudi Casanovas on a chest in the sitting room, in front of a print from Steve Macleod's Blackwater series
Tom Griffiths5/11The kitchen in their house near Henley
Tom Griffiths6/11Mariike and Ben discuss a bowl by Gutte Eriksen, while looking through one of the many specialist ceramics books in his stud
Tom Griffiths7/11Six Cups on a Ground by Julian Stair
Tom Griffiths8/11Discussing one of his porcelain cinerary jars with Marijke
Tom Griffiths9/11Large Jug, Large Faceted Beaker and Large Beaker from Julian's exhibition Equivalence
Tom Griffiths10/11Using a potter's rib to shape and smooth the clay on a thrown form
Tom Griffiths11/11Will, Dexter, Bastie, Mariike and Juno eniov a walk in fields close to the family home
