Mo Abbaro (17 October 1933 – 12 March 2016),[1][2] also known professionally as Mo Abdalla or Mohammed Ahmed Abdalla Abbaro,[3][4] was a London-based Sudaneseceramicist 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.[1] He graduated in Fine and Applied Arts from Khartoum Technical Institute in 1958,[1] the following year winning a scholarship to London to study ceramics at the Central School of Arts and Crafts.[1] 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.[5] He went back to Sudan to teach ceramics for some years, but decided to return to England in 1966[2] to pursue his career in Britain.[5]
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,[1] including The History of the Abbaros of Sudan since the 15th Century (1997).[2]
His ceramics are in the collections of London's British Museum, the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, and the Smithsonian Museum, Washington.[7] His work was shown in Frederique Cifuentes's 2017 exhibition Sudan: Emergence of Singularities at the P21 Gallery, London.[8]
