Innholdsfortegnelse for No. 119 i Ceramics: Art and Perception

Few people are unaware of who Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) is. However, many do not know that he was one of the major ceramicists of the twentieth century. Without a doubt, he is the first artist to radically change the intrinsic status of the ceramic object per se. With Picasso, the object becomes subject, that is to say an abstraction. It loses its inherent function; its quintessence. It becomes an image, a concept, instead of being just a utensil, a thing. Unfortunately, his exceptional conceptual contribution is virtually unknown, or simply misunderstood by the general public and many specialists. Contrary to popular belief, the relationship between Picasso and ceramics is detectable precociously early in his career. In the early 1900s in Paris, he had already worked in clay with Paco Durio…

Too often we focus on the academic aspects of art making while overlooking our communal oneness and spiritual connections to the planet. For many potters and ceramic artists who practice the art of wood firing, noborigama firings often morph into social events due to the communal nature and “people power needs” associated with the process. Such an event took place in Penryn, California in March 2022, which has elevated wood firing events to a whole new level. WorldStoke 2022, the brainchild of potter and sculptor, Rodney Mott, was a four-day event revolving around the firing of several wood, salt, and raku kilns, as well as artist lectures, demonstration workshops, Native American healing rituals, music, dancing, food, and fundraising pottery sales and auctions to feed local hungry citizens. Artists from across…

This piece is a geological exploration of my environment. It is made from a mix of a local clay and a clay body that I make especially for the wood firing process. I value the individuality that comes from using native clay. My interest in raw materials and what they will do when subjected to fire has been with me over the 40 plus years of my career…exploring materials not for what they are but what they will do… a large iron bleed showing through the clay, the soft luster of melted granite shine like stars in the night sky, the movement and folding of rock when in that molten state to the textures that come from within. Subjected to fire the natural ash build up that can form aggressive…

India, as an independent nation, is not one hundred years old. Yet, the area occupied by India is home to ceramic traditions going back thousands of years, and there is a visible resemblance between prehistoric ceramic figures and terra cotta creations still being made today. The history of Indian ceramics may not match the achievement of China, home of porcelain, or offer the rarified appreciation for ceramics found in Japan, home of the tea ceremony. But the ceramic culture on the subcontinent stands out for its breadth and depth and there is extraordinary local and regional diversity. Yet, throughout India pottery has played an essential role in ritual observances as well as everyday functional use. Not long ago more than one million individuals in India earned their livelihood primarily through…

Spontaneous, gestural, playful, absurd, and whimsical, tactile and threatening – these are just some of the words I would use to describe the work of Nicholas Weddell. From cups that are functional, but not daily-drinkers, to furniture that is not ordinary, Weddell causes us to stop and re-evaluate our paradigms about both. He snaps us back to the present. He turns everyday experiences into explorations. He turns a routine, such as drinking a cup of coffee or taking a seat in the parlor, into a ritual. While experiencing one of his works, the user can only be in the present. Weddell began as a functional potter but wanted brighter colors and stranger forms. He questions: “What is a cup?”, “What can it be?”, “Where does it place itself in someone’s…

Somehow it seems appropriate that Elizabeth Jaeger is a co-publisher of artists’ books as well as a maker of ceramics, because the storytelling quality of her objects parallels the heightened combination of materiality and narrative so often seen in artists’ books. But her objects are vignettes − glimpses, implications, mysteries, allusions − rather than a whole story. In her fifth solo at this lower-Manhattan gallery, titled “Holes,” she presented dull-black flattened globes atop powder-coated wire pedestals (all works 2021). From a distance, each looked like solidity atop transparency, but the truth was more complicated. The interior diagonal bracing of the pedestals brought to mind ladders or stairs, and the machined metal rigidity of the pedestals contrasted sharply with the touched, handmade quality of the objects resting on them. Each object…

As one entered the main gallery space to see nine substantial sculptures of curvy standing slabs by Katy Schimert, the whole visual field seemed to be in motion. The show was titled Niagara, linking the works to the famous waterfall in western New York state, where she grew up. Several individual works were named after segments of it, such as Horseshoe Falls. But the essence of this body of work is not so particular: it does not so much picture a given site as evoke fluidity. Schimert exploits clay’s well-known capacity to record its former condition of softness, which she magnifies in now-rigid fluted masses that emphasize verticality, although, in fact, all are wider than they are tall. It’s the implied motion that is vertical. One work is terracotta, the…

Wow! A powerful, multi-faceted ceramic event happened this March in California – WorldStoke 2022. With artists from across the world presenting and participating, this all-encompassing conference hit hard on all cylinders. Eminent presenters, demonstrators and participants all aligned in an inclusive and welcoming atmosphere that set the tone for an impressive, informative and memorable art symposium. Rodney Mott presented this extraordinary four-day woodfiring affair at Penryn, California Workshop, where T. Robert Pacini led the noborigama woodfiring. Artists and professors including Deborah Pittman, Bobby Scroggins, Virginia Scotchie, Emory Douglas, Glenn Grishkoff, Terry Shepherd, Chris Thompson, Ehren Toole, myself and many others came from near and far and made presentations and from around the globe people to attended and participated. A Native American ceremony led by Yaqui elder, Stan Padilla, kicked off…

This work is from an ongoing series titled Stasis in which I’ve been exploring both formal and conceptual correlations through the shifting interplay of ceramic form, appendage, color and texture. The physicality of form, and the ways in which objects occupy and conform to space, gravity and other objects, are important in both my process and conceptual strategies. Within this I explore a kind of uneasy equilibrium by examining the relationships between biomorphic form, human bodies and, most recently, microscopic life. I create tenuous connections between smaller, almost vestigial forms and larger referential forms, which are informed by ideas of sameness, polarity, and connection. In my working process, I throw various curvilinear elemental shapes on the wheel and then coax them into an assembled whole. These brightly coloured forms hopefully…

I’m working with lustre glazes at the moment and Yellow Slipper is the product of some of my recent experiments. Lustres are glazes made with metal oxides which, when fired in a reduction kiln, have an iridescent metallic finish. They were used a lot in Art Nouveau ceramics and fell from grace due to the expense of materials and an aesthetic which some might consider a little too “glitzy” for clay. It’s not so much the glitziness I really like, but the iridescence, it makes the work very interactive. As the light changes, the colours change. One moment the object is smokey yellow, the next its full of rainbows. The technique is tricky and just when I think I’ll give up, I open the kiln to a glittering array of…

A favourite could be the most recent of idea that makes it through. The one that’s been prototyped, tested for function and aesthetic merit, reworked and arrived. The Dish brings together for me, all of the risk/reward of concept, making and the wood firing process. It is a vessel of sorts. A vessel that began as a thick walled cylinder with aggressive horizontal throwing marks. Those horizontal marks soften and the form opens up as the cylinder is cut and rested on a block of foam. Cutting the half round away from the base of the cylinder is a designed adjustment to make it work with the hand and to instill a small disconnect from the cylinder. Most of my work begins on the kick wheel, a tool that demands…

While trimming is considered a basic technique, one today must wonder, what qualities are we really looking for in a foot? The contemporary studio pottery movement today represents an extremely diverse field. What once was described simply as functional, has splintered into factions based on aesthetic interests and technique creating specialized conference attending sects such as the wood firing community. Innovation, expression, and social issues have centered on the recent past and clay trends are moving away from traditional concepts and aesthetics, breaking the molds that were the conventions of studio pottery. As we reflect on 100 years since the creation of the initial studio pottery movement, I probe one element of this genre still relevant today. The foot. Contemporary criticism of Bernard Leach and his mingei movement colleagues has…

Cow’s cry at the dawn of 2021 (Year of the White Cow) was quite piercing. The outcry of the beloved and cherished spiritual animal felt strikingly different this year compared to the past five thousand years. The disparity in the outcry is not unrelated to the rampant pandemic raging all over the world, birthed by modern convenience and prosperity. What is the cow trying to communicate to mankind in the present moment? This article contemplates the history of East Asian twelve zodiacal animal deities and the meaning of the second animal, ‘cow’, in the twelve zodiacal animal deities through nine ceramic artists at Seoul’s “Space Shinseon”. Twelve Zodiacal Animal Deities is an “animal sculpture consisting of 12 animals responding to 12 different directions, 12 months, 12 hours” 1. The deities…

In the early eighties, the origins of clay were simple: it came in two colors and was available in rectangular, 25-pound bags. In the late eighties and in the early nineties, clay came in multiple 50 to 100 pound bags of dry material and you had to mix it all together in a Soldner Mixer. When I started traveling the world as a resident artist, I found that digging my own clay and processing it was as enlightening as making new work on, and from, foreign soil. After losing my studio practice, I began slowly rebuilding a way to continue working in clay without having any financial resources. I felt that I could start again, but I also felt that I was in danger of reversing my career after being…

While the pandemic has certainly provided more than a few speed humps for both Clay Gulgong and the work of Visual Arts teachers in schools, it has also created some unexpected and exciting solutions. The challenges of both producing work and then transporting works to an exhibition for K-12 in these times led us to work on a new format for showcasing the work of Australian students from K-12 in the form of a collaborative slide show. Teachers from schools in NSW, Victoria, Queensland, Tasmania and South Australia, with relatively short notice, contributed up to 6 slides of their students’ ceramic works from Kindergarten to Year 12. The finished presentation featured over 300 works from over 30 schools nationally, providing teachers with a wonderful, current survey of approaches to ceramic…

Your ceramic poodle pipes look like the bubble pipes we had as kids”, said a prospective art teacher buyer. I was peddling my wares at the Michigan Art Education Conference on Mackinac Island: books, ceramics, and, recent poodle marijuana pipes. Eureka! A new market ploy that skirted the stigma of me selling weed pipes, to selling “tongue-in-cheek” bubble pipes. Dual usage, two for the price of one, suck in marijuana smoke or blow out bubbles. “Your ceramic poodle pipes look like the bubble pipes we had as kids”, said a prospective art teacher buyer. Down the Rabbit Hole It had never been my intention to make marijuana or bubble pipes. It was that proverbial rabbit hole to blame. The previous summer we were at one of Michigan’s scenic vacation destinations,…

I don’t often look back at work I have done in the past and I don’t keep score of favourites, but while I am working, and when a piece emerges from the kiln, I do know what I am aiming for. I don’t pretend to any conceptual or political motives for my work. My work is not about issues or for causes, rather, my work is made for my own pleasure. That is not to say that all my work gives me pleasure. There are many things that can interfere with the small aesthetic joys that can be derived by holding a piece of porcelain in your hand, and a great deal of my effort is spent avoiding these distractions. Many of these are technical failures, small and large. Glazes…

In 2009 I was commissioned to produce a public artwork to embellish the planned Clarks Lane foot/cycle bridge crossing a new motorway being constructed west of Auckland. Ceramics was stipulated to acknowledge the historic heavy clay industry the area was famous for. The project particularly attracted me as it allowed me to reconnect in some ways to my own student days when I was involved in many performance and outdoor art works which engaged with elements of the natural and urban environments. It excited me to be taking ceramics into that same realm where it was to spread extensively over a variety of surfaces, including the bridge deck and the long stairway leading up to it and invite interaction with passers by. Pedestrians and cyclists would move through the work,…

Robinson’s first solo exhibition opened this Friday at the Pyrites gallery. Although Pyrites has always had an excellent website Robinson’s show is their first virtual only exhibition; this makes considerable demands on viewers who are unfamiliar with ceramic art, particularly with Robinson’s rugged, unglazed wood-fired vessels. The exhibition raises two important issues: one about the conditions that support an artist; how they acquire techniques and develop skills, how they learn about the culture of their discipline, its history, traditions and the contemporary ideas and discourse it attracts. The other whether there is anything special about the consumption of things made by hand and things made of clay and what limitations, if any, does a virtual presentation impose. For the first fifteen years of my life my knowledge of clay, like…

In September 2021, the British Ceramics Biennial (BCB) returned for its seventh edition with a dynamic five-week programme of exhibitions, new commissions and events in Stoke-on-Trent. After 18 months of immense challenge and disruption, the 2021 festival was a chance to celebrate the resilient and audacious artists we’ve had the joy to work with, our communities and partners and of course the city of Stoke-on-Trent as the world capital of ceramics. At the heart of each edition of this international ceramics festival is the headline exhibition AWARD, a prestigious exhibition that celebrates the vitality and standing of contemporary ceramics practice in the UK, located within the rich context of the history of British ceramics in Stoke-on-Trent. AWARD is a unique platform for UK-based contemporary artists working in clay, giving them…

The difficulty I have writing about colour at cone 10 is that not only do I not know at what temperature my pots are being fired at, I’m no longer sure that I know what colour is. And after delving into quantum physics I am no longer sure that time exists. Follow the science of colour for long enough and you find yourself in the realm of quantum physics. I don’t understand quantum physics, but as quantum physicists don’t fully understand it, I’m not embarrassed. I am a painter of pots. I always loved painting with traditional paints, moving from poster paints to water colours, to oils. They’re actually very different mediums, with the play of light on them affecting our perception of their colour, but essentially you can just…

Q: When I cut my pre-mixed commercial clay there is a circular crack. WIll that damage my pots? We all like to take the commercial pre-mixed clay out of the bag and start making pots immediately. However, there can be a hidden defect in the clay which might cause problems in the future. Commercial pre-mixed clays or potters who mix their own clay and employ a pug mill can produce clay with a Jelly Roll fault. In commercial operations the clay is first weighed, batched and then placed into a clay mixer with water added to form a plastic mass. It then goes on to the pug mill a machine composed of a hopper with rotating blades which push the clay into a tube. Inside the tube is a rotating…