Mo Abbaro

Mo Abbaro (17 October 1933 – 12 March 2016), also known professionally as Mo Abdalla, was a London-based Sudanese ceramicist and potter, who has been described by artist Oliver Bloom as "one of the world's finest ceramicists".

Life and career

Mohammed Ahmed Abdalla Abbaro was born in Abu Jibayha, Sudan. He graduated in fine and applied arts from Khartoum Technical Institute in 1958, the following year winning a scholarship to London to study ceramics at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. He did postgraduate studies in industrial pottery design at the North Staffordshire College of Ceramics, after which he had a period of training in chemical analyses of ceramics materials at the North Staffs College of Ceramics Technology. He went back to Sudan to teach ceramics for some years, but decided to return to England in 1966 to pursue his career in Britain.

He taught ceramics at the Camden Arts Centre for more than two decades, and had many exhibitions in London — including at the Barbican, the Whitechapel Gallery, the Mall Galleries, and the Iraqi Cultural Centre — and elsewhere in the UK, as well as in the US and Sweden. His studio and showroom were in King Henry’s Road, close to Primrose Hill.

He turned to writing in later life, publishing works on ceramic technique, such as Modern Ceramics — On the Interplay of Forms and Surfaces (2000), as well as on his own family history, including The History of the Abbaros of Sudan since the 15th Century (1997).

His ceramics are in the collections of the British Museum, Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, and the Smithsonian Museum, Washington.

Family

He had been married since 1964 to Rose, daughter of composer Elisabeth Lutyens and granddaughter of Sir Edwin Lutyens.

Abbaro died aged 80 in March 2016, survived by his wife and their son and two daughters.

External links

• Oliver Bloom, "The ceramicist", YouTube.