The co-founder of the Lamorna Pottery, alongside CHRISTOPHER JAMES LUDLOW.

After the end of World War II, Derrick Wilshaw and Ludlow met as fellow-students at a pottery in Stoke-on-Trent. In 1947 Ludlow returned to Penzance and came across the old milk factory in Lamorna, which he and Wilshaw converted to a pottery in order to set up in business together.

Ludlow was not commercially minded and struggled with his mental health, so the joint venture was not an unqualified success. In 1952 Wilshaw married Lilian Reynolds, a Helston girl. He found the pottery and its surroundings claustrophobic. In 1956, after the tragic drowning of their son, he left Lamorna for Falmouth, where he became a well-regarded lecturer in ceramics.

In an interview for a book on sculptors by Marion Whybrow, he commented: 'Clay has a skin-like quality that is important because I like a figurative element in my work. At some point it ceases to be clay and takes on a character and personality that you endow it with...What is important for me is the historical connection, a progression of development of forms, one relating to another. You can have a conversation through the work, making a spiritual contact and something visual between yourself and the material you are manipulating.'