Elizabeth Fritsch was born in Wales in 1940. Having studied the harp and piano at the Royal Academy of Music from 1958 - 1964, she was accepted in 1967 at the Royal College of Art, where David Queensbury was Head of Ceramics and her tutors included Hans Coper. In 1970 she was awarded the college's Silver Medal and Herbert Read Memorial Prize, and since then her work has been widely exhibited and she has won many prestigious ceramic awards. She was awarded the CBE in 1995 and a Senior Fellowship from the Royal College the same year.

Elizabeth Fritsch's pots are all hand-built and painted with coloured slips, and they have little to do with the mainstream of English studio pottery. From the beginning she has been a perfectionist, and music, painters - from Holbein and Blake to Malevich and Paolozzi - and thinkers such as Breton and Borges have all been important influences. Fritsch herself has written that at the time of her first individual exhibition 'geometric rhythms became more rigorous and spatial games took over both in the painting and in the forms themselves, which started to become foreshortened, inhabiting the shadowy space halfway between two and three dimensions....I like the surreal and insubstantial feeling it gives to a form - giving it, in a very literal sense, "edge".'