Art Review ... Create And Be Damned **** star rating The Metro, January 8th 2008. Tina Jackson

Setting out it's agenda by appropriating the name of Sir Francis Dashwood's legendarily irreverent - and at the time deemed unholy - 18th-century private members' club, the recently formed Hellfire Potters Club takes ceramics and drawings into the strange, weird realms of outsider art. Amedium often regarded as earthy and wholesome is given a refreshingly idiosyncratic spin in the hands of these four artists, whose unifying feature is an almost possessed attention to details and repeating forms.

Sophie Flynn uses her pottery to give form to things many might find distasteful; one of her clay sculptures is called Dumpy Deposits With Flies and, true to it's title, it shows flies copulating on piles of white poo. If you can get over the subject matter, it's rather attractive, and so is her Fly Tea Set. Flynn's Bat Nest and Vampire vases are simply lovely, featuring graceful convergent bat forms in a fluid style influenced by art nouveau.

Drew Caines' work features robot-formed ceramic sculptures and the weirdly wonderful series of Angel Drawings that includes a winged cat, a horned skull and a circus ringmaster.

Andrzej Skotny makes primitive styled heads that come into their own peering from woodland settings, and Michael Duffey's obsessive use of fine-scored mushroom gills creates dark fantasies in drawings that include Memory of Yemen, Three Types Of Ghost and the particularly splendid Mass Breakout From Hell.

Sophie Flynn is one of the Hellfire Potters, whose group show, Create And Be Damned, is a devilish depature from conventional ceramics.

How did you come to call yourselves the Hellfire Potters?

On a literal level, we work with fire. In a kiln, it goes up to 1260 degrees Celsius, so it's literally as hot as hell. And the original 18th-century Hellfire Club were libertines, pushing against the morality of their time. We see ourselves as free-thinkers pushing against the boundaries of what pottery can be.

Are there any similarities between yourselves and The Hellfire Club?

They were a bunch of rich people who got up to mischief, and we're poor people who get up to mischief. We've done a lot of hellraising in our time but hopefully we can transmute that into art.

How did the group form?

We met at a pottery workshop at Swarthmore and we realised the four of us were outsider artists. We decided to get together because we realised that in each case, our work had an obsessive feel to it, and when it all goes up together, it has an outsider feel: a dream-like, trance-like look.

Your own work features bats. Why are you drawn to them?

I tend to depict animals that a lot of people don't like - bats and flies living around shit. But I don't know if you've ever seen a bats' nest: it's like a Cubist sculpture, but constantly moving. I found a bat colony in the Tropical Garden in Leeds - it moves around, and they hang in pendulous shapes from the ceiling.

Aren't there connections in your pieces between bats and umbrellas?

Well bats are almost like living umbrellas. The shape is very similar, and the form and function. One day I was holding an umbrella, and I saw the connection.

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