Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2015 i Ceramics: Art and Perception

The year 2015 is just about to close and the world is still in turmoil. And with the turmoil, ceramics artists are still travelling to far reaches of the earth. Facebook keeps us connected no matter where we are. Friends from Australia are currently travelling in Japan. Potters and sculptors from all over the world are doing residencies, lecturing at colleges and universities, running residencies, doing research, exchanging ideas and techniques. The many opportunities that are available seem to be unique to ceramics artists as we want to learn, to move a little out of our comfort zones by going to new places and meeting new people. Along that vein, Ashwini Bhat of India is in the US now on a three-year visa. She spent the past semester as a…

KAYAKO HOSHINO’S STUDIO IS A SIMPLE, ALMOST austere, combination of timber and concrete. She sits quietly on a wooden stool by her workbench on which stands the subject of our interview – the piece she loved so much that she kept it for herself. As cameras and recording equipment are checked and rechecked she waits patiently, enveloped in an ineffable sense of calm. She is quiet, elegant and gracious. Her studio, where our interview will take place, is flooded with light from encircling windows, with views that spill out across the great expanse of Lake Biwa before sweeping over brilliant green rice fields and upward to steeply forested mountains. It is a beautiful setting. Over a just completed lunch at a local restaurant I have heard the story of how…

FOR FULL-TIME CERAMICS MAKERS, THE NEED TO GAIN a national standing for their work has never been more important. Added to this is the possibility of work being purchased for the nation, which is compelling. Step forward Christina McGregor, Keeper of Collections at the Crafts Council UK. Who are they? What do they do? Well, she and her colleagues support and promote ceramics makers amongst other crafts. Keeping them alive, and looking for the cutting-edge of the creative spirit which is the strength of the UK’s arts and crafts market. SO, HOW DOES IT WORK? From their fashionable headquarters in north London, McGregor works with Exhibitions & Collections colleagues on promoting the Crafts Council Collection both nationally and internationally. This includes one new national touring exhibition each year in which…

IF AN IDEAL SETTING EXISTS TO SHOWCASE PETER CHRISTIAN Johnson’s sculpture, one would be hard-pressed to find an environment more suitable than the grounds of the Archie Bray Foundation. The work would appear as welcome guests among the remnants of industrial decay, joining an audience of objects proudly displaying surfaces etched with the evidence of wear and tear. The relationship would be short-lived though, for this is a well-documented landscape of artefacts from which a purpose and function can be affixed. Isolate Johnson’s sculpture away from the rubble and the circumstances switch from eroding objects to an erosion of context. What remains is a genuine tribute to human labour and engineering, conceived by intuition and honed through his methodical construction process. Although some might legitimately argue that a CNC router,…

RALPH BACERRA: EXQUISITE BEAUTY, WAS HOSTED BY the Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, US 26 September – 6 December, 2015. Much has been written about the vanguard ceramics of mid-century Los Angeles clay artists: Peter Voulkos, John Mason, Paul Soldner and Kenneth Price, acknowledged as major leaders of Abstract Expressionist ceramics. In a first for Los Angeles, several key art venues opened exhibitions honouring the second generation of innovative ceramics makers.1 It began with a major tribute to Ralph Bacerra. In a word, Bacerra was the master of opulence. As one of Bacerra’s past students at Otis and as a recipient of his wisdom dispensed during his four-year term on the Advisory Board of the American Museum of Ceramic Art, I feel…

PAULA MURRAY’S POWERFULLY CONTEMPLATIVE exhibition Connection X Connexion at Art-image et espace Odyssée in Gatineau, Quebec inspires awe while inviting a relationship with the intangible self. At the heart of the exhibition of new work is an installation of 95 suspended porcelain scrolls, forming a series of swagging crisscrossing bridges that run the full length of the gallery. On the wall behind the hanging scrolls is a large white ceramic disk covered by hundreds of flat strips curling back and overlapping each other. As the installation moves toward the foreground, progressive piles of scroll debris, like a trace of missteps, are scattered on six additional blue disks below the bridge until it finally meets the floor in a quiet explosion of unfurling scrolls. Lights shining through the bridge leave ghostly…

SATAN CERAMICS IN NEW YORK CITY’S SALON 94 FREEMANS featuring the work of Mary Frey, Pat McCarthy, JJ Peet and Tom Sachs could be described as an exercise in contradiction since it is delightfully light. The title sets the tone and Satan is an auspicious one. An exhibition will either present art that stands on its own merit or as an apologia – this one is the latter. The exhibition is a jest, with artists refusing to take themselves or the art world too seriously; however, using bombast to distract the viewer from the exhibitions mundanity undermines the exhibition’s usefulness as witticism. Despite the propaganda – a woman in a wet T-shirt, pentagrams, zines, even a manifesto – the exhibition was more oculus than occult and reverent than irreverent. As…

ENTHUSIASM BEST DESCRIBES CHAWAN, TOM SACHS’ first solo exhibition with New York City’s Salon 94. Sachs chooses the most prized tenant of contemporary western ceramics and is at his ironical-best seeking out the universal through mass-production of the particular. Joining the ranks of innumerable potters producing hundreds of thousands of tea bowls, his reverence for chawan is beyond reproach, maybe. As the exhibition’s press release states, Sachs even flew to Japan solely to examine the 17th century black Raku-ware chawan national treasure. Sachs was born in New York in 1966, grew up in Connecticut, and moved back to New York City after consumerism, leaving the viewer to either suspect or admire it. Is there in reality a 17th century black Raku-ware Japanese national treasure named ‘Kanokomadara’ and does Sachs actually…

THE CUP, MUSIC, HOT RODS, POP CULTURE, MELANCHOLY, and humour are all inherent themes that we have come to associate with Ron Nagle’s smallscale sculpture. Recently, Nagle’s work is informed by another type of art – graffiti. Bubble-letter forms and spray-can chromatics have been appropriated from the streets of San Francisco, swallowed up and spat out by this ceramics veteran. But stirring up concepts and borrowing are not new for Nagle, “I have many interests, both inside and outside of art, so let’s combine this shit.” Although Nagle has been mentioned in numerous articles and books, and has shown in galleries and museum group exhibitions since the 1960s, it was not until 20122013 that the bestowal of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a showing at the Venice Biennale prompted his first…

PAOLA STACCIOLI (FLORENCE, 1972) had already displayed her work at the Galleria Arianna Sartori in Mantua, in 2012, in a duo-exhibition with her father, Paolo Staccioli (1943). She is following in her father’s footsteps even though she had not studied art, but earned a degree in Foreign Languages and Literature. Her creative spirit blossomed about 15 years ago when she started spending more time in her father’s workshop: Paolo is well-known throughout Italy for his lustre ceramics. Staccioli is an artist who lives in Florence, a city steeped in the culture of beauty. The absolute celebration of the Renaissance, the palaces, the sumptuous gardens, the extraordinary museums and the knowledge that so many famous artists including Giotto, Brunelleschi, Michelangelo worked in these places, under the same light, are extraordinary fuels…

THE SLOW REVEAL OF CHRISTOPHER HEADLEY’S NEW CERAMIC installation War Spoils exposes the viewer to deepening layers of horror. Here is an artist who deliberately has left himself open to the putrid news that pours forth every day from the media. People being ceremonially beheaded on YouTube, taken off a bus and shot, or hit by drones – such events have become commonplace. We are all familiar with the term, ‘The Spoils of War’. It legitimises the looting, pillaging and rape as a right of the victors after battle. It is a term that has resonated throughout history. By turning it around into War Spoils, a totally different meaning emerges; we identify an ambiguity. This other meaning is the driver behind this exhibition. War Spoils is a major installation that…

German and International Ceramics Since 1946 Grassi Museum of Applied Art Leipzig Edited by Olaf Thormann Published 2013 by Arnoldsche Art Publishers ISBN-10: 3897903911 ISBN-13: 978-3897903913 528 pages | Hard cover $50 € | sales@antquecc.com ARNOLDSHE PUBLISH BEAUTIFUL BOOKS. THEY ARE unafraid to take on specialist titles at which others would baulk. This second volume comprises the works in the Grassi and those promised to it. It holds reproductions of 579 works from 254 artists. The volume includes biographies and artists’ marks from each of the makers. This extensive range ensures the books future as an essential reference work. Many of the pieces it includes have been or will be donated to the Grassi Museum. Inevitably that factor reflects in personal biases in the collection but that can also be…

IN WHAT TURNED OUT TO BE THE LAST FIRING OF THE LEACH Pottery’s large soda kiln, Jeff Oestreich and Pat Burns produced a new body of work resulting from their month-long residency. Both Oestreich and Burns worked side-by-side in the workshop of the old Pottery: outside, the River Stennack murmured in its race towards the nearby sea and the bowed branches gradually lightened as autumn took hold. Oestreich, a Minnesota, US potter, is a regular visitor to the Leach Pottery: first arriving in 1969, to undertake an apprenticeship that saw him remain until 1971, Oestreich has made several subsequent returns to St Ives – his most recent residency was in 2012. This time Oestreich returned with Burns, another soda firer, hailing from Portland, who first worked with Oestreich in 1975.…

DECADES WORTH OF relentless selfquestioning, problem solving and reinvention inform Chris Gustin’s work; his deepest concern has been to keep his work developing. His retrospective at the American Museum of Ceramic Art in Pomona, California, US was curated by Sherry Leedy, a gallerist in Kansas City, Missouri, who was at Kansas City Art Institute in the early 1970s with Gustin. Leedy knows the origins of Gustin’s ideas and understands the arc of his work. Her selections, more than 80 objects and drawings from 1975 to 2012, illustrate the history of his ideas and their evolution via her concentration on particular series and the sequence of their development. Gustin has stated that the objects on display embody the story of his life as an artist. The energy of the work and…

FOR LUCA LANZI (BOLOGNA, ITALY 1977), ARTIST AND sculptor, the goal is to arouse deep emotions within the viewer. His intention reveals a willingness to be direct and empathetic towards the interlocutor, by choosing “subjects/objects” drawn from the realm of simple, infantile experience. The artist chooses areas of direct perception, accessible by the public. The objective is to bring to light suggestions belonging to the semantic field of artefacts which tend to be placed predominantly within the iconography of ‘fetish’, expressed in terracotta treated with mixed techniques. Curated by Laura Borghi, the exhibition, entitled The Hand and the Idol, is composed of 24 art works – drawings and ceramic sculptures – in which “the principal feature comprises a series of elements from the world of play, such as toys, mechanisms…

I TEACH CERAMICS AT CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY IN MONTREAL which holds one of the most diverse public art collections of any university in Canada. The collection contains 33 works, yet only a small portion of a single work is made of clay, in the form of tile. The same can be said of the larger field of public art where we find few projects in ceramics, outside of tile. Why is public art so rarely made with ceramics? Moreover, how is it that clay, an infinitely malleable material, only usually shows up as industrially formed tile in public art? How might ceramics connect materially with the city to shift our experience of it? Can this traditionally craft based medium offer a new perspective in public art? Questions such as these led…

GROUP EXHIBITIONS SOMETIMES LACK COHERENCE and in the end have little to say, but Japanese Ceramics at Erskine, Hall and Coe was cogent and straightforward, showcasing mostly older work by 11 established Japanese makers with some newer work included. As such, it presented well the type of much-loved Japanese ceramics that played such a pivotal role in the development of 20th century British studio pottery. There are many ceramics traditions in Japan, from finely decorated porcelain, which has been imported into the West since the 1600s, to the more sober folk art brought to the West’s attention by Bernard Leach and Shōji Hamada in the early 20th century, to the modern Western-influenced contemporary scene. The folk art type of ceramic work has links to the Mingei movement started by Hamada…