Innholdsfortegnelse for No. 116 i Ceramics: Art and Perception

Times have rarely been as fractious and precarious as now. If you’re not currently in lockdown (for the first or second time), then you might easily be by the time this issue reaches its way to your studio, library or home. When will we return to normal? Perhaps never. Perhaps we are yet to discover the new normal. We certainly aim to keep our normality afloat, aligned with T.S Eliot’s belief that “the very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man.” Making work in this fractured time, along with the meaning you make and the gestures you throw off, has never been more important. Our stress driven world has been turned upside down, not so much by a virus,…

Owen Rye’s autumn exhibition, A Daedal Gallimaufry, curated by Skepsi’s Anna Maas, was a tour de force in many ways, not least in its fortuitous timing. The bushfires were doused, finally, and the virus a low whisper (in Australia) at the time of the show’s opening. By its close, there was leisure and calm enough – just – for keen buyers to venture out to Eltham’s Montsalvat to collect their treasures. The show’s final day marked almost the last of what we once called ‘normal life’. But it was not just a quirk of fate that made this exhibition memorable. Owen Rye’s pots have an elemental quality, a dynamic stillness that seems to exist outside of time, or at least outside time as we obsessively measure and spend it. His…

Mary Law is an urban potter who has long lived in a mixed residential-commercial neighborhood in Berkeley, California that includes a number of other ceramists. She was shaped by a workshop with Karen Karnes and an apprenticeship with production potter Byron Temple, more than a sequence of degrees and residencies. And she makes a great story of it. Law was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1947. She has two much-older brothers. I wanted to be an architect when I was very young. When I was in junior high, I used to draw plans of houses. Of course I didn’t know what I was doing but it was really fun. My daddy was kind of a collaborator. We had a good time talking about stuff like that. My mother had a…

Navigating the sea of filial relationship is not easy for the son of an artist, especially in a society like Japan where filial piety has been a dominant ethos. How in the shadow of the father’s fame can the son achieve artistic independence without being side-tracked by rebellious ambition or burdened by self-erasing caution? In two forthcoming shows, Joan B. Mirviss Ltd. explores how two sons, Wakao Kei (b. 1967) and Suzuki Tetsu (b.1964), are successfully navigating these potentially turbulent artistic waters. Both Tetsu, the son of the National Living Treasure Suzuki Osamu (b.1934), and Kei, the son of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Gifu prefecture, Wakao Toshisada (b.1937), honor their fathers by embracing the ceramic traditions of Mino potters while forging their own distinctive paths within those traditions. Mino…

For three months during the fall of 2019, nearly 80 ceramic objects by the artist Don Reitz (1929–2014) were on view at the Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art on the campus of Westmont College, located in the hills east of Santa Barbara in Southern California. Reitz’s creative output was represented by a selection of robust sculptures and exuberant utilitarian ware. Towers, teastacks, large vessels, pitchers, jars, and tea bowls illustrated the creative breadth of this prolific artist, who expertly employed wood and salt-firing techniques to achieve painterly surfaces on his varied forms. Also known as “Mr. Salt”, Don Reitz successfully revived the age-old practice of salt glazing, advancing the technique with exciting effects. When he felt it was warranted, he used colored slips as a counterpoint to the warm hues…

Sentient was UK-based ceramic artist Rachel Wood’s first major exhibition in Australia following her residency at the Sturt Craft Centre in 2019. Wood’s ceramics delight in a vision of the natural world, told through experiences of bushwalking and exploration of the remnants of Gondwanaland − from the southern highlands, the Blue Mountains, the Central Coast and the Warrumbungles − revealing the harshness and beauty of this unforgiving country. Her observations and subsequent interpretations of these landscapes have served as a basis for the exhibition. To contextualize Wood’s particular interest in Australia, her previous residency at Sturt was in 2013 where she produced a body of work entitled Bark Vessels. Here she cited the Australian bush and its pervading sensory presence; its eucalypts, ghost gums, scribbly gums, iron bark, their textures,…

Chinese ceramic art changed abruptly at the end of the Qing Dynasty, even though the development of ceramics as an art continued through to the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In recent years there has been an increasing focus on the significance of the hand-glazed paintings that appeared on porcelain during the establishment of the PRC. It is widely known that the Qing Dynasty had been overthrown a century ago, led by the revolutionary Sun Yat-Sen. This new era opened China up to the outside world and brought influences of western culture. The decoration of porcelain during this time reflects the influence of the West and allows us to understand how Chinese women became interested in fashion from Europe and America, and therefore weakened the intrinsic values…

The problem can occur either in the glaze formula or the kiln cooling cycle or both. The process you are observing is devitrification when crystals form in a glaze during the first 200oC upon cooling. Longer times in this temperature range can cause increased crystal growth. As long as the glaze is in the liquid state crystals can form at any temperature range until the glaze becomes ridged upon cooling. In transparent glazes opacity and matte surface textures can occur in different degrees depending on the rate of cooling and the oxide component of the glaze formula. Glaze formulas containing calcium zinc, manganese, iron, rutile, titanium or are overloaded with metallic coloring oxides (oxide saturation) are more likely to form crystals in slow cooling conditions. As a general rule kilns…

Today the experience of waste and pollution is entirely natural. Wherever we happen to be, our adored archipelagos of locality are permeated by a profusion of contaminations that bathe the entire planet. In the world’s burgeoning metropolises − which are now home to well over half the human population − everyday life is carried out amidst a haze of industrial and photochemical air pollutions, the slow but steady secretion of toxins into waterways, soils and living cells, the seemingly endless accumulation of plastic bags, old furniture and discarded technology in laneways, parks and dumps, and the pummelling of our senses and bodies with the electromagnetic static of media and malodorous advertising. Such wholesale contamination is symptomatic of our civilisation’s economies of commodification and consumption. Floods of wastes pour forth from…

Red, ruddy, rubicund, rosy, the earth at its most vivified, vital and vibrant: the ubiquitous and heartening ‘baked earth’ that is terracotta appears in all spheres of daily experience. It is a material of diverse character. Terracotta is everywhere. It is the most common house and building brick; it is used in architecture for its warmth and mutability; in sewerage pipes and plumbing and it is in almost everyone’s garden in its most humble yet most efficacious form. The exhibition Takeit out of the Garden was held at the Manningham Art Gallery in suburban Melbourne, Australia from the 13th February to the 6th March 2020. The show was initiated by local ceramist Jane Annois and was linked to the 20th anniversary of the Warrandyte Pottery Expo. Both events included Richard…

Robin Welch died recently aged 83. He was an innovative artist who used ceramics, painting and printmaking as his chosen media within which he integrated themes. He developed new forms and techniques, often combining different methods of construction: hand-built, thrown and slab sections, to provide a canvas for his ideas. In 2007, to coincide with his 70th birthday, a major retrospective of his work was held at the Rufford Ceramic Centre in Nottinghamshire in recognition of his lifetime of commitment to making art. It included installations of pots, paintings, prints and wall-panels. Evident in many of these works were the influences of the Australian landscape, the colours, textures and its harsh, rugged beauty as expressed through Welch’s understanding of materiality. Welch was from Warwickshire and studied art at college in…

Craft and design have a lot of meeting points, including that the field of design may be considered a natural continuation of craft as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Designers and crafts people are developing new identities because their fields are affected by each other’s work. In recent decades the fields of ceramic art and ceramic design have increasingly influenced and fertilized each other. In addition, attempts to redefine craft and design boundaries are developing through original thought regarding manufacturing processes and practices. This is demonstrated through the expansion of the boundaries of traditional technologies, and the widespread use of new technologies such as digital media and new programming options. As well as the creation of alternative methods and materials that replace plaster casting molds, and the development of…

It was with great sadness that I learnt of the recent death of Ryoji Koie, one of Japan’s most innovative and internationally famous post-war artists. I feel deeply privileged to have known him and am a better person and potter as a result. I met Koie in 1991 when he worked in my studio to make his first London exhibition. I was not sure what to expect but was astounded by his energy and playful, prolific, approach, which tore up much that I thought I knew about the craft and aesthetics of Japanese ceramics. He told me, for example, that he thought the concepts of Wabi and Sabi, so close to the hearts of Leach and Hamada, were like black holes. In a fortnight he not only produced enough work…

It is wonderful as always to return to Denmark and I am greatly honored to be asked to address you on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of this museum. I have to tell you that I cried a little when I received this invitation. Thank you. I would like to thank Pia Wirnfeldt, Christina Rauh Oxbøll, the many volunteers that make the museum vibrant, the people and the foundations whose efforts and money support it and the City of Middlefart. I also feel so happy to be with and feel the great energies of my colleagues and friends, Betty, Birgit, Niels, Peter, Larry and Nina. Nina, if you are up there listening and watching, I greet you with love. We all do. Thank you for your life’s work. I…

Bent over the wheel, Hector Mavridis demonstrates to his workshop students how to throw wide terra cotta pots. Next, he guides each student in throwing large pots, pushing them beyond their comfort level. Then come the tall, narrow bottle forms, the composite pots, and the many experiments in glazing and firing: raku, pit firing, paper-kiln firing (in a kiln built by the students), and more. Born 1958 in Melbourne, Australia to Greek parents, Hector Mavridis and his family moved back to Greece in 1969. Between 1979 and 1988, he lived in Chicago, where he studied ceramics and linguistics at Northeastern Illinois University. Since 1988, Mavridis has lived in Thessaloniki, Greece’s second largest city, working as a ceramist and ceramics teacher, while holding solo exhibits in Greece and internationally. He has…

Representations informed by appropriations of motifs from traditional media such, as folk painting and traditional ceramics, are often adopted in contemporary Korean ceramics. This tendency demonstrates the artists’ desire for a more modern contextualization of traditions and their concern that traditional Korean art be as significant as the pursuit of new materials, media, and concepts, amid the spread of postmodern art which has now been positioned as the mainstream art of Korea. Such new interpretations of tradition that use appropriation have been led by young artists born since the 1960s. Young contemporary Korean ceramic artists have recreated traditions in a way that allows them to use it with a high degree of strategy in order to promote their own images and forge their own ceramic idiom. This generation is accustomed…

Over twelve years ago I quit my university teaching job, gave away all my possessions, and relocated to Japan. With no personal connections, no language skills, and very limited resources, I set out determined to change my life, and become a potter in Japan. However, during my first years in Japan I made few pots. Instead I focused on observing, understanding, and learning. Residing in a remote village in Mikawa, Aichi, I taught English, studied Omotosenke tea ceremony, and planned my excursions to historic pottery centers. Through the local newspaper I discovered a local community noborigama kiln in a nearby village. I volunteered in wood preparation and assisted in stoking, eventually building an anagama kiln at the site. In 2010 at the International Ceramic Research Center in Shigaraki I conducted…