Jim Partridge was born in Leeds in 1953 and began his academic formation at John Makepeace’s Parnham House School for Craftsmen in Wood in the 1970s – going on to become one of the most prominent woodworker of the twentieth century.
Jim Partridge & Liz Walmsley
Partridge has worked with his partner Liz Walmsley, who was born in London in 1952 and came from a background in ceramics, following the commission of a wooden walkway at Grizedale Forest in 1986.
The partnership produce works of domestic utilitarian production such as toast racks and bowls, through to large-scale site-specific work such as a balcony and bridge at Rozel Fort in Jersey, and a Bute memorial seat in the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh. Their work, often in green oak and yew, is scorched or bleached and polished to create a body of monochromatic work that honour their raw materials with an elegance and simplistic aesthetic quality that makes their pieces highly coveted.
Partridge regularly worked in collaboration with other makers and particularly with Ann Sutton, for whom he provided a lot of furniture for her home. The work of Partridge and Walmsley is held in numerous important publish collections including The British Council, The Crafts Council, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Kyoto Museum of Modern Art. The couple were shortlisted for the LOEWE Craft Prize in 2019.
