Discontinuous marks — traces of vague, obscure physicality — are loaded in his vessels and adapt themselves to the trajectory of time and action, more clearly fluctuating in space and light. These traces shake up our sight and perception.
Jisu Hong writes on Inchin Lee’s Solo Exhibition Houses Laden With Time
I could close the door on the world. There was a reality and then an altered reality and that fascinated me.
Henrietta Farrelly-Barnett interviews Juz Jitson
One notable aspect of the manufacturing process is the use of round strips called piulos, hollowed out and manually assembled to create complex additions such as human and animal features without the use of a potter’s wheel or molds.
Leonor Adán, Margarita Alvarado and Simón Urbina discuss The Aesthetics of Clay and Mapuche Pottery
I often think about why these organic patterns are so mesmerizing; one of the reasons is their unrestricted flow, and whether I’m looking at an aerial photo of a huge river delta or a close-up of a human eye it is clear there is some perfect chaos at work.
Michael Rice
A recent project was to create a large vase decorated with peonies, a flower revered by a Malaysian family who commissioned the work. It was a daunting commission for Aylieff, not just for the technical problems that she might have encountered when working on this scale and to a deadline, but also to create something that fulfilled the clients brief without compromising her aesthetic.
Paul Bailey writes on Felicity Aylieff
Newspapers themselves are nothing if not ephemeral, replaced daily. Notions of eternal clay and long-lasting ceramic also play against the remembrance of waste and trash in some of the New York pieces.
Janet Koplos reviews MEM and Art Factory Jonanjima, Tokyo
There is a wealth of clever pottery, but to my mind clever doesn’t always provide sustenance. I’ve begun to wonder if an older, pre-internet paradigm provided a catalyst for an admittedly slower, but deeper investigation and personal evolution of work.
Adam Posnak writes on Stephen Colby
In 20th-century ceramics, despite the contribution given by the creative female thought to the operativeness, the project and the transmission of knowledge, what we can define as the other half of ceramics, had to accept a marginal position in the world of art and research.
Francesca Pirozzi looks at the work of Clara Garesio
Atypically, the written statements in the exhibition catalogue and on the didactics displayed in the show are in the artists’ own voices. This breaks convention where Aboriginal artists had up until this point been filtered through the curator’s lens.
Heidi McKenzie reviews Clay Stories: Contemporary Indigenous Ceramics from Remote Australia.
There are still no shortcuts; no correspondence courses for learning the craft and art of pottery. The skills we make look easy come heavily mortgaged to the Bank of Constant Practice. Converting a ball of clay into a five-gallon jug in the time it takes a skilled surgeon to remove an appendix accomplishes no less a miracle.
Jack Troy
We are what we create, and currently this is increasingly communicated through clay – a soulful, alchemistic medium as old as time itself.
Keith Brymer Jones discusses what motivates him.
Once I had returned to the Peak District, in the north of England, I began exploring texture, and the uncontrived decoration that is developed through the live environment within the kiln.
Alex Shimwell
… and much much more. 160 pages of critical, creative and technical writing on contemporary ceramic art from around the world.
Cover image: Keith Brymer Jones
