Indholdsfortegnelse for No. 111 i Ceramics: Art and Perception

Itend to fall in love with my own work be it written or visual or even the work I do as a psychiatric nurse practitioner. The creative process saved me every time, starting when I was four or five years old.” Nina Gaby is giving a workshop at the AVA CNina Gaby is giving a workshop at the AVA Center for the Arts in Lebanon, New Hampshire. Other Alphabets: Dimensional Memoir is the current exhibition in the Rebecca Lawrence Gallery at AVA. Twenty of her porcelain sculptures are featured. This is her opening statement and you can almost hear the spines of listeners snapping to attention. Gaby’s introduction is as unique as her appearance. She isn’t a tall woman and she is closer to seventy years old than sixty. Her…

Shell Warrior stands defiantly upon a four-legged urn reminiscent of a Chinese bronze censor ready to burn incense – offerings to win favours from the Gods. The feathered shoulders initially purposed for an owl hold up an aqua-blue battle helmet and fix in place the yellow hooves chopped from the limbs of a forgotten donkey. Shell Warrior is an assemblage of liberated fragments which have come together through a continuing series of breakages, edits and re-arrangements until final confirmation. This body of work has been created through destruction which seems like a novel course of action. The result is to force the work one way or another, for good or ill. As the hammer falls there is no determined outcome – breaking things is random and haphazard and relies a…

I was born by lamplight in my parent’s bed. I apparently tried to resist entering the world by thrusting my head backwards. My mother believed this caused some brain damage explaining my subsequent dysfunctional behavior and problems with reading and writing. Like Dickens’s Pip my name was shortened and I became Seb, which my childish dyslexic brain and dominant left eye reversed. The resulting gender reassignment gave my siblings much sadistic delight. It is now difficult to imagine that a village, only fifty miles from London, on the Great North Road, in the middle of the twentieth century, had no mains electricity. It was also without a modern sewage system. A tall laconic man called Vim, I thought after the cleaning product, would empty our chemical lavatory each week. Every…

There was a time when meanings were focused and reality could be fixed; when that sort of belief disappeared, things became uncertain and open to interpretation– Bridget Riley Op Art is one of the 20th Century‘s Abstract Art movements that uses optical illusions. In this movement, the viewer is given impressions through movements, hidden images and transformed patterns on two-dimensional surfaces. Optical art is, in a way, a perfect integration of science and art. The use of the know-how from science leads to new artwork and new ideas in art. While explaining his philosophy of art and ceramics, Yuksel says: “Art is a mathematical or geometrical game for me. Everything begins with creative a process on clay before it is transformed into the final artwork. I am trying to create…

Assuming the kiln used the same firing cycle as in the past the most likely change occurred in the particle size of the feldspar. From the description the feldspar did not go into a melt as readily as the finer mesh feldspar used in the past. Ceramic materials melt under several conditions in this instance a larger particle size feldspar did not fully go into an active melt causing the semi opaque condition of the glaze. The general rule in ceramic materials is, the finer the mesh, the more active the melt. Conversely, larger particle size materials have less surface area exposed to the kiln heat. Most feldspars used by potters are produced in 200 mesh and 325 mesh sizes with some feldspars coarser such as 30 mesh. (The larger…

Confluence is quite a good title for this gathering of people from all around the world sharing a common aesthetic language and approach to making. It implies a joining together and mixing with each other on a personal and professional level. It is an inclusive term… Given the current state of our world, inclusivity is more important than ever. For groups like ours, inclusivity has another benefit. It builds diversity within the ecology of our ideas and practice that benefits us all. I have titled my presentation Collaborating with Uncertainty – Towards Visual Complexity. Woodfiring is arguably the most uncertain of making methods, however uncertainty and visual complexity can be experienced in other ways of working with clay. This talk comes out of my research and thinking undertaken over the…

One can enjoy their color, texture and form, focusing upon them as objects of beauty, yet a shadow of worry weights down that pleasure. Clay is everywhere in New York galleries these days, and the distinction between controlled (or crafted) work and that which focuses on clay’s malleability without concern for mastery seems to be evaporating. Andrew Lord is one who has always escaped that distinction, since his works have had everything to do with touch yet are conceptual enough to please those who prefer subject matter in their art. Los Angeles-based Brian Rochefort may be mapping out his own happy position in that spectrum, with his second essentially sold-out show in a prominent New York art gallery. A few years back, Rochefort (b. 1985) had a body of utilitarian…

Skoto is a gallery in New York’s Chelsea art neighborhood that often shows African artists not frequently seen in the US. A recent exhibition was a stellar example: on view were works by Ladi Kwali (1925-1984), the Nigerian potter best known in the West for her association with Michael Cardew. She came from a family of female potters working in earthenware and made water jars, cooking vessels and more by coiling and other hand work. At Abuja, where Cardew was a pottery officer for the colonial Nigerian government, she became the business’s first female potter in 1954, where she learned to throw working in stoneware. She traveled with Cardew to Britain in 1961 and America in 1972, recieving honors from her own country, and Britain. Several spectacular pieces of hers,…

When does a maker stop developing? The obvious answer is never, unless they are repeating what has gone before. So, when does a career stop? For Kathryn Hearn it doesn’t, but simply takes a new direction. Sitting in the vast building which is Central Saint Martins (CSM) in a high-tech area of London that is one of the driving forces of a new economy, Hearn reflects on her time at CSM and the new challenges that await her after she retiresasCourseDirectorofCeramicsand Design. (Although her connection to CSM has not ended completely as she has been invited back to teach the second year MA students and to supervise two full-time PhD candidates.) Hearn began by explaining: “Most recently I have been developing a new body of porcelain forms designed for the…

Six years ago, I took a sort of personal pilgrimage to the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia. While most of my years have been spent landlocked in Eastern Ontario, Canada, I was actually born to two young adventurers as they started their lives together in rural BC. Twenty-eight years later, I had returned to the west coast and it immediately felt like home. I knew that feeling because I’ve felt something similar every time I have been close to the ocean – any ocean, anywhere. Perhaps that’s what comes from being born on the west coast, to a family whose roots are buried deep in the east coast. The time I feel most grounded is when I’m near the sea. One evening on my first return to BC, I saw…

Colombian Double Stirrup Jars: Natalia Arbelaez Pre-Columbian Colombian ceramics remain a large influence in my work. My Colombian heritage and connection to an Amerindian ancestry that many Latin Americans share fuels my interest. I have been using traditional Pre-Columbian methods, such as coil and pinch, to create double stirrup jars that are prominent to the Colombian region. With the combination of tradition and my contemporary figures I am storytelling our histories in a parallel way. Using terracotta remains important in my work as I reference many aspects of Pre-Columbian ceramics. The terracotta also references the land of my country and mountains where the clay abundantly remains on the land we walked and continue to walk on. Gold is another material that is important in my work and is found in…

I had a feeling for clay from early on. After poking around in the garden as a child, in the ochre yellow London clay that made our bricks, I first had a lump of potter’s clay in my hands at school when I was nine. Material you can squeeze that ends up rigid and lasting, shiny and colourful, has great appeal. The processes of coiling and slabbing clay let you build gradually from vague ideas, cutting your coat according to your cloth. Working its plasticity, waiting for it to be leather hard, imagination flows into the awkwardness, the physical constraints of the stuff. The things clay won’t do are gifts to the stubborn and spontaneous maker finding a path. I had a feeling for clay from early on. After poking…

Every five years – for the last 15 – the City of Hobart Art Prize affords the ceramic medium a moment in the sun, and 2015, my first back home for a decade or so, was one such year. Still grappling with reverse culture shock, I ventured into the newly revamped Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) to view the exhibition. Not only has the entrance been moved and dinosaur skeleton relocated to the reception veranda but the various galleries in the sandstone warren have also been shuffled. I was lost in a space once familiar. So, like many of the tourists that drift this far south, I inquired as to the whereabouts of the art prize exhibition and was duly directed past the blue carpet. The City of Hobart…

Babak Daleki was born in Tehran in 1964. He grew up during the revolution surrounded by the horrors of war and so travelled to different cities and countries before eventually settling in California. Growing up in Iran, with its rich civilization and wide range of art styles extending back to ancient times, has been a strong influence on his life as a ceramist. Ceramics is deeply rooted in Persian culture and its art history, from the Cyrus Cylinder and decorative Persian pottery from Persepolis to thousands of poems written or carved in script from Bukhara, Samarkand, Nishapur and the western portion of India, to Taq-e-Kesra, Baghdad and east of the Danube. Daleki began his journey as a potter in 1985, when his first series of work was shown at Tehran’s…

Consumption is the contemporary frenzy of humanity… Consumption in every sense… Consumption of objects, of life, of love… Today, human beings consume not in accordance with their needs; instead, we provide objects with meanings, and consume in order to gain status and to be happy. Dilek Alkan Özdemir is an artist who focuses on this problematique by means of her work: “Our world weighs on consumption and its critique. A monotony of consumption culture is triumphant. The system is a giant wheel, and we individuals are elements of it. We are discontent, in search of an emancipation; but the vicious circle locks us in it. Some of us do not even wish to be free from it any more. Now, it is time for the influential individuals, society leaders,…

The last kilns have been unloaded, the 14-course farewell banquet is over, we've said, smiled, and hugged our goodbyes, and our group of twenty artists, potters, and educators is ready to leave Jindezhen, in Shangxi Province, for Xian and then Beijing before heading back to the States. Heavy rains have been falling for several days, and more is forecast. Twice within five miles of our hotel we encounter water deep enough to reach our bus’s floorboards. At the edge of town where a stretch of highway is bordered on both sides for half a mile by porcelain outlets, the water is clearly too deep for any vehicle. Four men can be seen bobbing 50 yards away, pushing makeshift rafts in the neck-deep slough. Porcelain pots by the hundreds float everywhere.…