Indholdsfortegnelse for #104 i Ceramics: Art and Perception

SITTING ON MY DESK ARE TWO CERAMIC PIECES THAT I have been looking at off and on for several days. Prior to sitting on the desk the same two pots sat for many weeks on the mantle in my office and as I worked I would regularly stop and look at them. One, made by Richard Hensley, is a rather pointed symmetrical oval form 20 inches long by 12 inches wide at the midpoint by an inch and threequarters deep. It could be used as a serving dish or as a stunningly elegant swimming pool designed for a miniature world. The piece is glazed in a range of beige tones going from matte mustard yellow through a delicate almost rose colour. Two plants with greyish white leaves and seedpods heading…

The recent exhibition featuring pam lins titled model model model is a near balance of formal concern and subtle activism. The telephone, Enzo Mari furniture, Le Corbusier and the VKhUTEMAS are the models Lins uses to frame paradigms and disentangle the composite of ideas shaping how she interprets the world – the model as self-portrait. The work, exquisitely conceived and exceptionally installed, melds today’s DIY culture with Constructivism – a theme that regularly emerges in Lins’ work and is wonderfully worked out in this exhibition. The main gallery is staged with an installation wherein Lins re-creates a student exhibition held at the VKhUTEMAS in the late 1920s. Sourced from a black and white photograph, the Soviet technical workshop is seen filled with students and their architectural models. Lins’ installation is…

IT MIGHT BE A MARK OF HOW MUCH THE CITIZENS OF Brighton respect the visual arts that I was given a police escort to the studio of Emily Gardiner, or it could be I was so lost that I asked an officer in a squad car the way. After some thought on the complexity of the route he simply said follow me. To find the studio at Robetson Yard is not easy. It is squeezed in between Victorian domestic housing in a suburban area. But once through the wooden gates you are in a different world. If ceramics makers had the equivalent of an artists’ garret, then this is it. Untouched for at least 50 years it has a beautiful courtyard once used as a Victorian laundry, leading into a…

With a highly influential body of work spanning more than 50 years, Janet DeBoos is firmly situated as one of Australia’s most prominent ceramists. The first ever retrospective of DeBoos’ work, Janet DeBoos: A Survey, at Craft ACT: Craft + Design Centre, showcases not only the artist’s versatility and preoccupation with function, but how a high degree of pluralism operating within contemporary ceramics is one of the tradition’s greatest strengths. Compared to other art forms, ceramists have unprecedented freedom to practice a rich diversity of styles, techniques, themes and practices, without succumbing to rigid hierarchies. This depth of diversity allows ceramists to respond to an increasingly globalised world with a high level of reflexivity and individuality. Key to the success of Janet DeBoos: A Survey success is curator Peter Haynes,…

OBJECTS MARK WAYPOINTS ALONG EVER-SHIFTING pathways; they act as material reminders of people, their pasts and their presents, the places and spaces that they inhabit and of their everyday lives. This article is a consideration of Irish potter Jack Doherty’s arrival at his most ambitious and important project to date, Waypoint in the context of his broader journey as a maker of ceramic vessels. Waypoint, a collaboration with curator Sarah Frangleton, began as a multi-site exhibition as part of the St Ives September Festival 2015. Doherty took as his starting point the historic fishermen’s chapels and lodges scattered about the fishing village of St Ives, Cornwall, England that overlook the Atlantic Ocean, exploring the myriad histories, meanings and memories contained within these historic buildings. Frangleton stated: “By placing Doherty’s soda-fired…

The summer exhibition many a slip at marsden woo, London, UK was guest-curated by Alison Britton, who invited 50 participants to ‘juggle with the domestic symbol of the cup’. The title’s reference to the well-known British proverb, ‘There’s many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip’, added a sense of whimsy, but also expressed an undertone of Britishness that always reminds us that disaster lurks, even in the most mundane ventures. There were certainly individual ‘slips’ in this exhibition, but many more successes, which more than made up for them. The brief allowed artists of different media, including ‘even’ some writers, to respond in their own particular styles and, as such, offered an abbreviated showcase of contemporary craft, especially ceramics. It is not surprising that with Britton’s vast experience…

Memory is a supple thing: the same event can be remembered differently by two people or, while trying to recall a certain event, it lies maddeningly just past your grasp. Shin Yeon Jeon tackles this confounding situation by presenting ceramic art works whose stories wrap around in a vortex of ideas or are piled up in a seemingly random array. Originally from Seoul, South Korea, she earned a BFA in Oriental Painting from Ewha Womans University, Korea in 1992 and moved to the US in 1996. She went on to earn a graduate certificate in Ceramic Arts from Hood College in Frederick, Maryland in 2003 and her Ceramics MFA in 2007 from Towson University, also in Maryland. Jeon is an artist, teacher, writer, wife and a mother, quite the balancing…

To hear pauliina pöllänen talk about her recent work, lacking any visual clues or prior knowledge of her practice, you might think that she has been busy building houses, or perhaps sculptures you could walk around in. Pools of glaze ‘flood like water to the basement in the Springtime’ (an annual event in Finland) and works take shape built ‘around space’. It is the particular phrase “primordial architecture” (Pöllänen’s own) that seems to capture the spirit of this idea with the most nuance. Curvy and sensual but structurally sound, each sculpture looks like a dwelling in which the placement of the walls, floors and ceilings have all been carefully considered, and a natural flow of light touches the surfaces of different ‘rooms’ in various ways. Layer upon layer of glaze…

THE SAMUEL P HARN MUSEUM OF ART AT THE UNIVERSITY of Florida (US) in Gainesville hosted a captivating exhibition of ceramics from contemporary Japan. In recent decades, collectors and museums have been enthusiastically adding Japanese ceramics to their collections. A selection from the Horvitz Collection offered viewers the chance to see a range of works – those reminiscent of centuries of tradition such as tea wares, works from the S?deisha movement with a flair for the avant-garde, vessels from the Mingei (Folk art) movement established in 1926, sculptural objets d’art, or works Collection offered viewers the chance to see a range of works – those reminiscent of centuries of tradition such as tea wares, works from the S?deisha movement with a flair for the avant-garde, vessels from the Mingei (Folk…

THE CURATORIAL CHOICES IN SELECTING FROM A major, private, post-war ceramics collection in Florida, US numbering more than 400 objects by more than 50 artists admittedly represented ‘just one interpretive approach’ toward elucidating their nature.1 Yale’s methodology was not insularly media-driven or craft based, but essentially period based. What emerged was the elaborate combining of some 80 modern ceramic works on temporary loan from Linda Leonard Schlenger, many presumably to be donated2, with 200 objects from the museum’s formidable collection of paintings, sculpture, works on paper and many of its own post-WWII ceramics. The exhibition title privileges, if not champions, the unique joint presentation as an intimate integration. This is an exhibition that could not conceivably travel. The values of “shared theoretical approaches, biographical networks and formal characteristics” are what…

VELIMIR VUKICEVIC, A SERBIAN CERAMIST WHO HAS produced art for more than 30 years, had a solo exhibition, Play with Reality at the Contemporary Art Gallery Subotica, in Serbia. Vukicevic creates porcelain sculptures and vessels usually overlain with intricate, illusionistic two-dimensional imagery. The colours are a range of bright mineral pigments on the off white porcelain, often delicately outlined in black. The images play off of the three-dimensional forms, often in a witty manner. There are several categories of works. Like so many, Vukicevic began in a more functional vein and through the years function has become increasing vestigial – with some pieces in his mature period being entirely sculptural. His vessels, teapots and bowls, often have colourful imagery on them, or they sometimes are unpigmented. Some of them appear…

THIS EXHIBITION CHARTS THE 60 YEAR HISTORY OF THE renowned ceramics department at the National Art School, formerly East Sydney Technical College. The show contains an extraordinary depth and diversity of skill and style, beginning with the work of cornerstone educator Peter Rushforth, whose pots greet the viewer with sombre form and tone. Wheel formed, there is an earthiness to his robust pots that is supremely complemented by the depth of glaze that, although fixed in time, seems alive, in particular his Chun Blue Blossom Jar (undated) appears to flow with a meditative tidal pulse. In contrast to this tranquility is Stephen Bird’s Wall Plates (2012–2015) installation, mounted on a free standing wall that, like the spirit walls (yingbi) of traditional Chinese gardens, guard the entrance, restricting the progress of…

Dichotomy is a term that easily comes to mind when viewing the ceramic works of Sunshine Cobb. With textural surfaces that remind us of old worn out wood, leather, or metal objects from long ago, her pieces possess a visual acuity along with obvious marks of the hand left behind through the making process, all simultaneously inviting human touch. This is but one example of the delicate ‘balance’ found in the dichotomy one sees within the ceramic objects produced by Cobb. These contrasts are the life support of her work, drawing from inspirations accumulated over years of looking, thinking and making. It is the process of stepping outside herself and into her daily life and surroundings where she discovers ideas for new shapes and surfaces, each radiating a particular life…

The simply titled work usa, first exhibited at the Socially Conscious Abstraction exhibition at the SMArt Gallery, San Francisco, US in early 2014, is a large mass of southern ice porcelain, clinging tenaciously to the gallery wall. Glaringly white and satin smooth at its core, its surface, its presence is an evanescent topography of spiky cities and rural and wilderness depressions. It is not the USA as presented by political or economic interest groups, or the physical form of a nation pinched and pulled by recent economic adjustments, but a sculptural work of art wrought from clay that has undergone a process of wedging, punching, pulling, scraping, folding and finally subjected to intense heat. While as a work of art based on current demographics, it is in many ways a…