About

George Simon Attard is a Maltese ceramic artist based in Skåne, southern Sweden. He came to clay in 2023, bringing to it a long career in science. His research includes foundational work across the chemical sciences which has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals.

For him, science and art come from a single impulse, what he calls discovery-driven creativity: the urge to explore unfamiliar ground, whether a new area of chemistry or a new way of working clay. His laboratory discipline of close observation, methodical experiment, careful recording, and analytical thinking carries directly into the studio and is trained on how things age: the specific ways metal corrodes, paint flakes, enamel chips and paper yellows.

He works chiefly in trompe l’oeil, rendering worn everyday objects in clay so convincingly that the ceramic reads as the material it imitates. In these artworks, what the surface records (wear, handling, staining, corrosion) is the meaning of the piece and not decoration. His body of work Scrapyard Treasures (2025–) makes ceramic objects that pass for corroded, discarded metal; an earlier body of work, Claythings, first tested the approach in 2023. Since 2020 he has also worked with the metal artist Marie Louise Kold on copper patinas.

His first solo exhibition, Il-kamra ta’ missieri (My Father’s Room), opens at Studio 87 in Valletta on the 20th May 2027. It reconstructs a single Maltese room as it might have stood between 1943 and 1975 — an office, workshop and store — furnished entirely with ceramic objects, and asks what can be known about a person, and the world they lived in, from the things they leave behind.