Innholdsfortegnelse for No. 120 i Ceramics: Art and Perception

I have a poor memory for formative moments, but I do remember my life changing one rainy summer day when, aged nine or ten, I saw three Japanese animated films with my father. My parents had separated shortly after my first birthday; my father lived abroad, and we rarely shared each other’s company. So we watched alone, the two of us, until the room disappeared, lit only by the illumination of the television screen. Like any child of the ‘90s, I was raised on Saturday morning cartoons and comic strips. But here was something altogether different, almost painful, and which reached me in a place I had not felt before. Princess Mononoke follows Prince Ashitaka, fatally cursed by a corrupted, dying god, on his search for the forest spirit Shishigami who…

“ART ENABLES US TO FIND OURSELVES AND LOSE OURSELVES AT THE SAME TIME”– THOMAS MERTON At Studio Calyx Kolkata (India) we always encourage and nurture creativity from all aspects. Tamal Bhattacharya (co-owner and resident artist) creates his ceramic sculptures, murals and he loves to work with eclectic mediums. He did his BFA at Kala Bhavana and his MFA at Maharaja Swajirao University (Vadodara, Gujrat, India). He has participated in many group and solo shows in India and abroad. Experimenting with murals is a significant artistic activity to Bhattacharya. Recently he has done three murals in three different walls of the building of the Taj Hotel (City Centre, New Town, Kolkata). He believes that these murals represent a mighty tool of emancipation, freedom of expression. The relief parts depict decorative geometric…

There are many ways to quantify knowledge and its acquisition. Empiricism is the study of knowledge arising from the senses; how we learn about the world through our sensorial encounters. This is a study of the process of throwing, its nature, origin, sensorial mapping and how it can be seen to reflect more widely the experience of being human. What follows is an auto-ethnographic study of my experience of throwing and, at the same time, how this relationship between hand and material can inform my understanding of other related interactions in the world. A pot thrown on the wheel and then altered contains a wealth of knowledge that not only contributes to understanding a ceramic technique but also defines new ways of looking/being. Through the activity of throwing, I transition…

Ceramics featuring children in their design is an interesting aspect of Chinese pottery. Originating with Rāhula, the son of Buddha, it later evolved into pictures of children at play which held the promise of blessings. The gender of the children featured are predominantly boys, indicating the popular prayers offered up for the birth of a son – not least because boys were the labourers in agricultural communities. In Taoist beliefs (where Tao is the root of heaven and earth, mother of everything, and the origin of the world), children are presumed innocent, unadorned, wushen [without self-restraint], and unselfish. Returning to a childlike state was in accordance with the ideal of uniting nature and heaven, adding to the popularity of children being featured in the decoration of ceramics. They first appeared…

Gertrude Graham Smith, better known as Gay, settled in rural North Carolina, not far from the Penland School of Crafts, in the early 1990s. Smith was born to a privileged background in Philadelphia in 1953. Her father was an obstetrician/gynecologist who also taught the subject; her mother was a college graduate who in her later years was ordained an Episcopalian minister. Although Episcopalians are generally associated with upper or upper middle class WASP society, which is where I come from, they also have a very strong good works/service orientation, so there’s actually some pretty liberal, socially oriented Episcopalians out there. Her mother was the assistant priest at a church serving a poor African-American community in North Philadelphia. Smith’s grandmother was very interested in antiques, loved beautiful objects and cared about…

Q: How can I fix my wedging table as I am finding small pieces of plaster in my clay? Wedging Table Canvas Often a simple device in the studio can prevent future problems. It is always best to learn from others' mistakes rather than your own. Identify the problem Many potters have experienced a semi elliptical 1/8” to ½”crack in their low temperature bisque or high temperature fired ware. Upon peeling back, the defect a conical hole reveals either a black or white nodule at the bottom. Lime pop occurs when moisture in the air comes into contact with a carbonized lime nodule, causing its expansion in an unyielding fired clay body. Unfortunately, this defect can occur when the unglazed or glazed pottery is removed from the kiln. It can…

As its second exhibition, this new gallery brought in Wisconsin potter Rick Hintze for a show consisting entirely of sizeable stoneware vessels, each cryptically dated 2010-2021. Hintze has been making functional pottery since the 1970s, and while he is not confined to a signature style, all his work over the years - functional, vessels or sculpture - has had a consistent character of modesty yet persuasiveness. The works on view here have not abandoned that low-key harmony in favor of exaggerated form, vivid colour, savage surface or sociopolitical content, the usual routes to ceramic celebrity today. Instead, they made me think of the late Warren MacKenzie’s description of his own work as being the product of the quiet midwestern landscape. Hintze shares that recessive assurance. With the exception of two…

It’s a little odd to be asked to celebrate your own birthday. Odder still, when it’s not quite yours to celebrate. This year marks 50 since the Goldmark Gallery, in one form or another, has been trading. And although I have known the gallery all my living memory, I’m not sure I was even two years old when I first met its founder and my stepfather, Mike Goldmark. I am told we sized each other up and decided we would get along fine. He has been a best friend, teacher, and confidant ever since – and for the last eight years, my employer. On our first meeting in the early ‘90s, Mike was then living on the top floor of the gallery, where I would later retire after school and…

“EVERYTHING IS A FORM, A HUMAN AND LIFE ITSELF IS FORM”– HONORÉ DE BALZAC (1799-1850) A vessel’s space with no limit Every ceramic artist experiences a moment when what they have made becomes self-evident; not as a working vessel, or as an exhibit, but as a lump replete with its three-dimensional qualities in space-time. Their vessels appear in various forms depending on variables such as light and hour, changing the atmosphere completely. Ceramic artist Yeo Byonguk most certainly experiences such moments given that he has fashioned hollow objects with clay, in different shapes, and arranged them in different ways for decades. A vessel is a ‘working object’, and this is Yeo Byonguk’s starting point; a hollow mass with its own weight and volume influenced by gravity. A vessel is often…

Kathy Butterly is a much-celebrated ceramist whose eccentric forms and exuberant colors – and her art-world success with them – mark a notable female extension of the funk humor of Robert Arneson, with whom she studied. Funk was pretty much a boys’ club, but she managed to make it, if not “feminine” since it’s hard to say what that means nowadays, at least lighter in spirit and less vulgar. She continues her mastery with her latest show, her second with Cohan. But it’s curious that she has backed off on the variety of forms, restricting herself to a mold taken from a commercial small fishbowl. There’s still plenty of three-dimensional movement in the pieces, but it’s in the George Ohr sort of deformation and the Peter Voulkos sort of puncturing.…

It was over four centuries ago (January 8th, 1632, to be exact) that Gerardus Vossius delivered his inaugural lecture titled De historiae utilitate (On the usefulness of history) at the opening of the Athenaeum Illustre. The following day, Caspar Barlaeus delivered his lecture Mercator Sapiens (Wise Merchant) and together, these two learned and internationally renowned professors established the foundations of what was to become the University of Amsterdam. It was at this illustrious tertiary institution that Monique Deul earned a master’s degree in Law before embarking on a successful career in music – ultimately working with the London Symphony Orchestra as its Patron Administrator and the Wigmore Hall as their Head of Development. In 2012 there was another successful career switch when she founded Taste Contemporary, launching her first exhibition…

In this reflective essay, I invite the reader to look at, meaning to see and to think about, pottery differently. I do this by considering place and embodiment in the context of ceramic work created by Mr. Willi Singleton. ‘Place’ has begun to occupy a great deal of thought in the humanities. There are volumes of books, numerous articles and lectures on its various aspects.1 Important themes pertaining to place include issues of identity and attachment. Generally speaking, when we discuss a place, we are talking about a location and its environment. Yi-Fu Tuan, in his seminal book Space and Place (2001), asserts that ‘place’ is established when things are no longer in motion, or have come to a resting place.2 This sense of ‘place’ is created by the perception…

NM: It occurred to me that you really enjoy how stories thread themselves within and around objects, so I was hoping we could use the ceramic shards you have collected since childhood as a timeline to explore your life with clay; how they each contain their own histories and continue to influence your ceramics… WK: That sounds good. NM: So, what do you have for us? WK: Well, we've got (I've got) a whole box full of bits. I don't know where to start really, probably best to start with a couple of bits of salt-glaze. These are pieces of salt-glazed stoneware that were made at the Fulham Pottery in the late 17th, early 18th century. And they're simply thrown out of clay, dipped in a slip to get a…

The documented relationship between ceramic art and typography can be traced from the creation of Sumerian tablets dating from 8000 B.C., to contemporary artworks. Due to clay’s malleability, it is conducive to the creation of letters and signs. Moreover, since its durability increases with firing, the medium can preserve written information for a long time. Ceramic objects and typography can come together as a means of communication and information transfer that are a means of artistic self-expression. At present, ceramics with textural and surface typographic elements feature various techniques. This article reflects upon contemporary Turkish ceramic artists who use typography in their work. The analysis includes classifications such as the legibility of typographic characters, the content of the writing, and textural and surface effects on ceramic surfaces. On some objects…

“THINGS SHOULD BE DESCRIBED AS SIMPLY AS POSSIBLE, BUT NOT SIMPLER.”− ALBERT EINSTEIN Q: As an experienced potter I do bisque firings in my electric kiln to cone 06 (1828°F / 998°C). However, when I did a bisque firing in a gas kiln using the same temperature and kiln firing cycle some of my pots cracked. Why did this happen? A: Heat Transfer As potters firing kilns we are familiar with the methods of heat transfer: Conduction is the transfer of heat through solids. When the kiln is being fired, kiln shelves gather and then release heat during the firing and continue to do so after the heat source is turned off. Heat is transferred directly through the solid kiln shelves, posts and pots. Convection is the process by which…