Ceramic Design, Art and Architecture TOM MORRIS
TOM MORRIS
New Wave Clay Ceramic Design, Art and Architecture
New Wave Clay
Contents 4
INTRODUCTION by Tom Morris
76 S I M P L I C I T Y 78 Jongjin Park 84 Akiko Hirai 8 I N C O N V E R S A T I O N 88 Maren Kloppmann Edmund de Waal on a craft revival 92 Olivier van Herpt 98 Carina Ciscato 10 J O Y 104 Tessy King 12 John Booth 108 Fenella Elms 16 Ahryun Lee 112 Johannes Nagel 22 Jennie Jieun Lee 118 Maria Kristofersson 28 Ashley Hicks 122 Sara Flynn 32 Matteo Cibic 126 Yuta Segawa 38 Chris Wolston 132 Julia Haft-Candell 42 The Haas Brothers 136 Adam Silverman 48 Liselotte Watkins 140 Derek Wilson 52 Takuro Kuwata 146 Emmanuel Boos 58 Reinaldo Sanguino 62 Katie Stout 150 I N C O N V E R S A T I O N 68 Sandy Brown Hella Jongerius on industry 74 E S S A Y 152 S T R U C T U R E Ceramics, interiors and some 154 Paola Paronetto humour everyday in the home 160 Studio Furthermore by Martin Brudnizki 166 Roger Coll
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Contents
170 Floris Wubben 258 Phoebe Cummings 174 Yun Wook Mun 262 Zachary Eastwood-Bloom 178 Turi Heisselberg Pedersen 268 Heidi Anderson 184 Bruce Rowe 272 Reiko Kaneko 188 Mia E Gรถransson 278 Malene Hartmann Rasmussen 194 Amanda Hollomon-Cook 282 Luke Edward Hall 198 James Rigler 286 Matsubayashi Hosai XVI 204 Ben Medansky 210 Cody Hoyt 290 I N C O N V E R S A T I O N 214 Dougall Paulson Grayson Perry on the 218 Bari Ziperstein decorative pot 222 E S S A Y 292 I N D E X Beginning, building and living with a collection by Sarah Griffin 224 N O S T A L G I A 226 Hitomi Hosono 232 Charlotte Mary Pack 236 Eric Roinestad 240 Brian Rochefort 244 Apparatu 248 Dylan Bowen 252 Tortus
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New Wave Clay
TOM MORRIS
Introduction
To many, any mention of ceramics will conjure up images of dusty, slightly worthy craftsmen toiling over a wheel, digging clay out of the ground and wandering around in aprons. To some, it will be understood as a pleasant garden shed hobby, something their grandparents took up after retirement. To few, though, will it summon the idea of an innovative, vital creative enquiry being embraced by the young. In the last decade or so, ceramics has been subject to something of a revival – in making and collecting. A highly inventive new generation of ceramicists has developed what is possible with the craft and has been joined by waves of people from other creative fields – architecture, furniture, illustration, interiors, painting – who are realising clay’s unique assets and bringing a fresh perspective to the sector. New Wave Clay focuses on this lively crossover between traditional craft, collectible design and domestic-scale sculpture.
Everything we could ever want or need – ostensibly at least – can be sourced, ordered or called upon through that shiny surface that we touch all day. So along comes clay: a cruddy, muddy value-less medium. To turn this tricky thing into ceramic is a process that blends all elemental life forces: earth, water, fire and air. It also takes concentration, time and mess. But, out of all this, comes something that can last forever; some of the oldest surviving human artefacts are ceramic. It’s no wonder so many people are discovering the thrill. The digital age, conversely, has its advantages. Many of today’s successful ceramicists would not be where they are without the support, inspiration and publicity that social media has given them. Small-scale ceramic celebrities have been made with the help of likes. In turn, traditional media has also paid attention: ‘Why does everyone suddenly love ceramics?’, ‘Why handmade ceramics are white hot’, ‘Pottery is the next big mindfulness trend’ scream headlines from publications including The New York Times, The Telegraph and Vogue. Real life communities have been solidifying too. Many of the people profiled in this book began on courses at open studios such as Turning Earth in London or Sculpture Space in New York, which are run a little bit like pastoral mem-
R E V I VA L A N D R E C A L I B R AT I O N And while pottery's renaissance takes place against the backdrop of technology, the digital age, conversely, has had its advantages. The digital revolution has irreversibly changed the world in the last 20 years. We live in an age of instant gratification.
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Introduction
bers’ clubs. These venues have been responsible for creating worldwide connections and augmenting a sense of community, which has been gradually eroded in the last two decades with a depleting higher education system in many nations. Additionally, a new network of retailers and gallerists has been instrumental in elevating the worth – literally and socially – of clay work. Dealers such as Patrick Parrish, R & Company, The Future Perfect, Adrian Sassoon, Marsden Woo, Galerie Kreo and Gallery Fumi position their ‘ceramic artists’ somewhere between, and symbolically away from, contemporary art galleries and dedicated craft centres. Values are higher and display is better. These dealers are feeding a huge appetite for ceramics among consumers. Clay objects offer a warmth, opacity, tactility and depth that counteract the glassy, transparent austerity of a world full of technology. Many of the ceramicists in this book produce work that caters to the desire for something a bit rough, handmade and imperfect. Ugly, even. Ceramics have the power – like indoor plants or textile art, which have both been subject to the surge in popularity in recent years – to bring a bit of analogue life to inert spaces in an overwhelmingly digital world. How else to explain the rise of both ceramic furniture? Ceramics can alter the character of a domestic environment and change the way we feel on a day to day basis. That is nothing new, but it is a fact that is being appreciated afresh.
tually took shape in the mad eccentricities of Ken Price, Peter Voulkos and then Betty Woodman. In Europe, there was a group of radicals in the 1970s and 80s who ditched the wheel all together. More recently, Grayson Perry won the Turner Prize with a set of vases. This trajectory took things made of clay into contemporary art galleries, where they remain today in the work of Rebecca Warren, Jesse Wine and Ai Weiwei and dozens more. Much of the current generation bounces around between these two sectors, caring to properly sign up to neither. Their work could be described as studio pottery in that it’s unique, technically interesting and adds sculptural qualities to recognisable ‘pot’ shapes. Yet it also has artistic concerns and thinks beyond ceramics. Much of it is ‘about’ things rather than ‘for’ things. It is ‘ceramic design’ simply in the fact that it uses the medium to realise a creative vision, rather than a vision coming about as a result of technical experimentation. It is art, craft, design all at the same time; finally the boundaries and labels of who makes what and what it’s called have disappeared. Clay has finally been democratised and yanked out of its ghetto by creative people – artists, craftsmen, designers – who are embracing its unique qualities and none of its labels. New Wave Clay focuses on this imaginative mix of people: classically trained potters who create design-led pieces, product designers who use clay as a means of creative expression, in addition to those with backgrounds in interior decoration, architecture and illustration. Their collective output includes decorative objects, murals, vessels, vases, furniture and 3D printed objects. The ambition of the book is to show the diversity of this area of creative production and the way in which history, craft, technology and design are all intersecting in the present time. Ceramics today are experimental, conceptual, energetic and considered. They speak loudly and are demanding of one’s attention, whether formally or in its principles. They ask why, not just how. They are meaningful and serious. Charlotte Mary Pack makes porcelain models of animals on the endangered species list. She insists 15 per cent of sales goes to charity. Mia E Göransson makes slip-cast porcelain landscapes that discuss her anxiety about climate change. Phoebe Cummings creates highly intricate floral sculptures – and then ruins them as a comment on time and memory. They rethink what craft and agency is. Olivier Van Herpt produces his vessels using a 3D printer. He embraces changes in vibration, airflow and the clay body so that imperfections are left on the finished piece, inferring a sense of the handmade. The Haas Brothers ‘design’ their works, which are made by other people’s hands. Ceramic is changing the landscape of the built environment too. There has been a series of landmark projects in recent years showing the possibilities of clay. In 2017, the renovated Sack-
A WIDER WORLD All these factors have widened the ceramic world far beyond its ghetto. Today, a ‘clay woke’ generation has emerged (a term that respected critic, dealer and author Garth Clark uses, so I will too) who embrace the unique benefits of clay: its lack of internal structure, its relative cheapness as a raw material and its versatility for modelling. Fundamentally, the definitions of who uses clay and what can be made out of it has shifted. It’s about time. For decades, western ceramics was caught between two splinters. On the one hand, there was the studio pottery movement. This sector revolved around craftspeople who were utterly dedicated to the material and the mission of pushing the boundaries of technique and method. It was a reaction against the industrialisation of pottery; made up of a team of creators that dug their own clay, mixed their own glazes, fired their own kilns and largely steered clear of making anything too arty. Bernard Leach was the granddaddy: he founded his pottery in the English coastal city of St Ives and wrote extensively on the matter. Leach and his ilk produced pots about pots – on an almost impossibly high moral ground. On the other hand, there was the highly experimental stream of artists who just happened to use clay in their work. These people included Pablo Picasso and Isamu Noguchi and, in the USA, even-
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New Wave Clay
ler Courtyard at the V&A Museum in London was revealed, where 11,000 porcelain tiles were implemented in the architect Amanda Levete’s design. At the time of writing, ground has just broken on the 300-metre-tall Wasl Tower in Dubai, which will be one of the world’s tallest ceramic facades when it completes in 2020. In this book, we single out one small-scale project that embraces ceramic’s decorative power in architecture. Fundamentally, ceramics break rules and are highly unorthodox. Furniture cannot be made out of porcelain? Sculpture cannot be printed by machine? Non-ceramic material cannot be considered clay? To the establishment, this frivolity might come across as casual craftsmanship: flippant tourism in an age-old art form. To many – including myself – this is what makes it so exciting. It’s not simply a case of breaking rules, it’s not knowing what the rules are in the first place.
are worthy of their own book, so I have left them out of this one. New Wave Clay accidentally but appropriately centres on the 18th and 19th century ceramic heartlands in the USA, UK, northern Europe, Japan and South Korea. The 55 people profiled are arranged in four broad chapters, arranged by the feeling elicited in the viewer by their work instead of the achievements or techniques of the craftsman. Any classification system in such a diverse, makeshift and unruly movement is arbitrary but there are some conspicuous narratives. I am aware that many artists in the book span more than one, sometimes all four. I encourage you to make personal connections and interpretations of the book to connect these dots. We feature work how it is meant to be experienced: photographed in real environments, contextualized at home or in studios. More than anything, ceramics has allowed itself to be decorative again. A variety of experts in the field have kindly contributed opinions on the state of play today in the form of conversations and essays. British artist Edmund de Waal discusses the context of this craft revival. Interior designer Martin Brudnizki elaborates on how ceramics can change the character of an internal or domestic space. Hella Jongerius, the Dutch product designer who has experimented extensively with ceramics throughout her career, talks about the opposing forces of craft and industry. Sarah Griffin reflects on her ceramics collection and, finally, Grayson Perry has the last word on the split between art and craft. Joy, the opening chapter, delves into the fun that can be derived from making and looking at contemporary pottery. Simplicity, the second chapter, concerns those who appreciate no-frills austerity in in their work. The third chapter, Structure, gathers together hand-built work made by ceramicists who approach clay as a tool for engineering silhouettes. Lastly, we will look at how vernacular pottery techniques and aesthetic tropes from history are being re-appropriated by modern day artists in Nostalgia, the fourth chapter. Of course, nostalgia runs throughout the whole book. In spite of the avant-garde daring many of the artists show, ceramics is eternally laced with tradition. The ability to turn malleable clay into a durable material was first discovered 25,000 years ago. Making ceramics is a way to convene with this rich past of art, design, craft, decoration, architecture, crockery, technology, building and industry. It is also a way to think about approaching the future. In all its various shapes, sizes, colours and coordinations, clay comes with a vitality not felt in decades.
WHO CARES? New Wave Clay is by no means encyclopedic. It is a very specific snapshot of a very interesting point in time. I might describe work as post-post-modern, neo-minimal, expressionist, but let’s simply agree to describe this new wave as part of a ‘liberalised force’ (a perfectly appropriate term first coined by Emmanuel Cooper). If these ceramicists, fine artist sculptors, designer-makers – whatever you want to call them – are unified by one thing, it is their strong sense of individualism and verve. And, fundamentally, their interest in clay. In this book, alongside highly skilled potters, there are people who bake children’s clay in a kitchen oven; artists who exhibit the 2D paper they have cut slabs of clay out on as standalone artworks on the wall; people who use 3D printers so they never actually touch the material; there are those who work in the artist-potter tradition, following in the footsteps of Picasso or Roger Fry of the Omega Workshop, in using ready-made pottery as a canvas for decoration. It is my intention to be equally feckless and not be restricted by the labels and industry limitations that pigeonholed pottery over the 20th century. It broadly covers design, art and architecture in name, but specially focuses on that which is created out of design principles: context, content, purpose and form. This, according to the people in the book, is as interesting as technique. They push the potential of the object, rather than the limitations of the craft. In this way they are all designers. Whilst design may infer larger-scale manufacturing, every item is unique and handmade. The industrial sector of the ceramics world is an increasingly interesting place: especially with the efforts of Heath Ceramics in San Francisco and 1882 Ltd in Stoke-on-Trent, who have both invested hugely in design talent such as Adam Silverman and Max Lamb to jumpstart local, entrenched industry. They
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Introduction
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New Wave Clay
EDMUND DE WAAL ON A C R A F T R E V I VA L
‘There’s a whole generation of people who did not use materials like clay, wood and fibre in primary school. They didn’t make a mess. Now they’re in their twenties and thirties and, boy, are they making a mess’
London-based artist and writer EDMUND DE WAAL is known for his large-scale installations of porcelain vessels, which are informed by his passion for architecture, space and sound. His work appears in the collections of the V&A Museum in London and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. He has written widely on ceramics, most notably his ode to porcelain, The White Road (2015), and his family memoir, The Hare With Amber Eyes (2010).
What's happening now, which is fantastic, is truly a renaissance. It's the plurality of people using clay and other things. It's brought down the skill base, but brought up the enthusiasm. It's a recalibration – it's not a discipline as such, it's a series of overlapping areas of interest and connection.
TOM MORRIS: What do you think has caused this renaissance? EDMUND DE WAAL: One of the interesting things is that it's cyclical. There was a great moment in the 1970s when everyone was thrilled by ceramics as a discipline. There were new courses opening, lots of galleries around the world and then, in the 1980s and 90s, almost a total collapse of the field. It was retreat into a very defended, inward-looking place.
Some people might say that's a bad thing. Yes. Some people are profoundly threatened by this – the people for whom ceramics are a vocational way of life. Fair enough, but there's still a residual Bernard Leach authenticity shtick within the ceramics world. It says basically: don't live in cities, dig your own clay, sell things really cheaply, all the modus vivendi is still there and it's quite punitive. That's fine; those people will always be there. There will always be people who
Yes.
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Is that a good thing?
In Conversation
have a particular attitude and a particular path. But there are other worlds too. What you're seeing is people who are profoundly serious about skill, who will make their life within ceramics and that's wonderful. And there are people for whom it is something that is part of a whole artistic, design or lifestyle practice.
A genuinely popular rethinking of where clay might happen in society can only be a good thing. Installation and display has been hugely important to your work. How do you think ceramics has the power to transform an interior space? There are many places in which ceramics can work beautifully, interrogatively and architecturally, rather than just having things on a mantelpiece. The places where you can encounter ceramics have always been manifold. It's to do with touch. It's about moving things around – it's very hard to move paintings around. There's also that sense of play that's fabulous – letting things rest and then moving them all around again. There's an Ur relationship between people and ceramics, which is so basic. What is a ceramic? It's something that is made out of mud, fire and water. It's the first things that human beings have ever made – why not live with them? Why not have them around you? There is something on that level of immediacy that is remarkable.
We live in a digital age. This younger generation has been brought up seeing the world through a shiny flat screen with very little tactility in their life. Do you think this has also caused this interest in clay? There's a whole generation of people who did not use materials like clay, wood and fibre in primary school. They didn't make a mess. Now they're in their twenties and thirties and, boy, are they making a mess. They're returning to materials with abandon and discovering the visceral pleasures of getting your hands into something. Of course it's a reconnection with the bodily thing. It's also to do with time. The velocity and pace of things at the moment is so extraordinary, that actually having to slow down and discover that you can't make things quickly is profound. They're very, very excited to find out how long it takes to do something. People go to classes to learn to throw and realise it's going to take forever – and that that's fine. How might a designer's approach to ceramics be different to a potter's? A designer will use clay to realise a form they have in their head. A potter will have an idea of what they want to make because of a technique they are exploring. It’s not a material that anyone has ever owned, or a discipline has ever owned. That's the reality. Sculptors have used it always, potters have used it always, and people have used it to make architecture. At every point, you find that someone else has used it in a different way. It's kind of crap to then say, 'you shouldn't do that because it doesn't obey the scriptures of what ceramics means.'
The most everyday mug feels the same as an expensive ceramic sculpture. Touch is democratic in that way. It is all the same base material – fired earth – no matter what its value. What about ceramic in architecture? There was a huge precedence of this, but has it become a forgotten art form? It's coming back. There's so much happening. What is interesting is how few conventional ceramic firms can deal with the demand and interest that there is. The aspiration of architects to work with clay is beating a lot of the gaps in the knowledge of how to do it. You think of the incredible facades in Chicago made out of tiles, or the mark making in Adobe houses. Why wouldn't you want a building made out of clay? It's got everything. The point of this book is to celebrate the joy of ceramic things and also the joy of making. Why does the act of making beguile you so much? Why do you love it still, forty years on? It returns me to who I want to be, which is a fully present human being. It's using clay not as an escape but as a return. It's a return to being a human being that breathes. The breathing affects the clay and every movement affects the outcome. It slows me down. It brings me back to a place which is quite a good place to be – someone who is more present, more alive, more in the moment. It is a delight, to meet this beautiful contingent material every day.
And that did happen, especially over the course of the 20th century with the studio pottery movement. It ghettoised clay. Yes, there were series of different people using ceramics in very different ways. There was Isamu Noguchi making his studio out of clay or Asger Jorn riding his Vespa through a playground full of clay to make a mural. There were brilliant examples of people who just used it viscerally. And then there was the ghetto: the unbelievably moralised thing about what pots meant. Pots meant function, cheapness, and the most reductive vessel. What's happening now is very interesting because there's so much happening and no one really has tried to map all these different kinds of practices and where they overlap.
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J O Y Ceramicists who excel in their use of colour, glaze and sense of humour to create vibrant, trumpeting work that excite the eye
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New Wave Clay
JOHN BOOTH
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Joy
This London designer’s background in fashion and illustration is conveyed in the pattern-cut production and sunny cartoonishness of his vessels
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New Wave Clay
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Joy
The worlds of fashion and ceramics are not a million miles away, according to JOHN BOOTH. The Central Saint Martins fashion graduate-turned-illustrator-turned-ceramicist hand builds his pieces according to the same principles – and even the same paper – as he once applied to pattern cutting. Booth started working with clay to produce the faces he illustrates in 2D form. Over time they ‘stood up’ into single head-shaped vases, then doubled up into twins and then he turned his Cocteau-esque style to vessels. An assistant helps build the forms and then Booth steps in to add appendages and paint with underglaze. ‘If you're more
← The heads are made in limited runs and are clearly influenced by the ceramicist’s bright, optimistic illustrative style. → Booth’s first experiments were making 2D face ‘plates’ similar to his drawings. He then progressed into standalone vessels.
P R I M E C L AY B O DY
Stoneware
PRIME TECHNIQUE
Hand building PRIME GLAZES
Stained slips, coloured underglazes and clear glaze PREDOMINANT FORM
Sculpture, vessels and figurines 15
excited about decorating something but have to spend weeks trying to throw it first, what's the point? Just get someone to do it for you,’ he says, admitting it actually takes longer to paint the pieces than it does to build them. Booth, who has worked with brands such as Fendi and Globetrotter, would like to explore making wood, glass and ceramic furniture next. He cites his time at Central Saint Martins as having a huge effect on this multidisciplinary approach. ‘If someone asks me to make something in a material I don't know, I generally say yes,’ he says. ‘I think you can always figure it out if you have the inclination.’
New Wave Clay
CHRIS WOLSTON
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Joy
Product designer Chris Wolston developed an interest in terracotta while studying traditional brick making – and turned it into furniture
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New Wave Clay
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Joy P R I M E C L AY B O DY
Earthenware
PRIME TECHNIQUE
Hand building and coiling PRIME GLAZES
None
PREDOMINANT FORM
Furniture
← Wolston learnt sand casting and brick making in Colombia. The thumbprints on his furniture deliberately reference the marks left by brick makers in Medellin on their wares. → Every piece is handmade in a laborious, time-consuming process. Wolston was in fact inspired by banal plastic furniture that can be used indoors and outdoors.
CHRIS WOLSTON does not like to limit himself to one material. The designer, who divides his time living between Brooklyn and Medellin in Colombia, more commonly uses aluminum and glass or neon in his work. His foray into ceramics came about through experimentation. Wolston first travelled to Colombia on a Fulbright research trip to research traditional ways of making bricks there. He spent time in a non-mechanised factory where bricks were still made by hand and was drawn to the impressions of workers’ fingers left on the surface. Walking around the city of Medellin, Wolston noticed how the hand marks were smeared across most facades. ‘I thought it would be interesting to turn the residue of the
hand and fingers into a pattern to cover the work in the way of glaze or paint,’ he says. The terracotta furniture that Wolston went on to develop has its roots in the Colombian project in many ways. Firstly, they are all named after places in the nation, including the Chicoral table and the Cocora planter. He spent a lot of time in studying a pre-Colombian ceramics archive during his trips there and, stylistically, there is a squat, simplified naïveté that links with figurative art of Mesopotamia. Wolston has anthropomorphised his pieces – heads of chairs sprouting with cacti and armrests that wave at you – to emphasise this. ‘Combining traditional technique with playful fabrication, my work both embraces and at the same time protests functionalism,’ he says.
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Joy
K ATIE STOUT At once both playful objects and political statements, Katie Stout’s witty ceramic works pack a visual and meaningful punch
KATIE STOUT describes her ceramic lighting and accessories, as well as her wider practice in furniture, as ‘naïve pop’. They merge a playful whimsy with highly simplified form. Stout is enormously experimental and hands-on with her works but also polemical: the Girls collection of kitsch mirrors and lamps are in actual fact statements on the way society disempowers women by using the ‘G’ word. Katie Stout was born in Maine, grew up in New Jersey and studied her BFA at Rhode Island School of Design. Soon after graduating from RISD,
Stout became gallery director at New York’s cult design showroom, Johnson Trading Gallery. Soon after that, she entered, starred in and won the first season of the US design reality competition, Ellen’s Design Show. All this, and she was only born in 1989. Now based in Brooklyn, New York, Stout is typical of her millennial generation in choosing to not always take typical career paths and have plenty of fun along the way. She is not one to shy away from vulgarity, politics, humour or celebrity: in fact, she bends them to her advantage with pleasure and intelligence.
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Stout conducts a complete narrative: she designed the carpet, which was produced by Amini, and the wallpaper, which was produced by Flavor Paper, as a setting for her Girl Lamps.
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Joy
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Joy P R I M E C L AY B O DY
Earthenware
PRIME TECHNIQUE
Hand building and pinching PRIME GLAZES
Lusters and paints PREDOMINANT FORM
Lighting and product design
A trio of deliberately provocative Girl Mirrors, which Stout calls ‘unapologetically themselves’.
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SIM PLI CITY Austere, no-frills shapes and a pared-back palettes, ceramics that share a wabi-sabi unfussiness in form, function or both
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Simplicity
Various test pieces made by Park to try out strength and colour, each measuring 3 x 22 x 3 cm.
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92
Simplicity
OLI V IER VA N HER P T Dutch product designer Olivier van Herpt uses 3D-printing technology to emulate an ancient pottery technique in contemporary form
OLIVIER VAN HERPT makes ceramic objects using a 3D printing machine. Clay is loaded into a specially developed extruder, which sprays out layer upon layer of clay according to the design Van Herpt makes using computer software. These layers build up slowly to reveal the vessel. This process can take anything between one hour and the best part of a day, swapping the hands of the craftsman for cold, hard, technological production. The technology took Van Herpt five years to develop: he invented an extruder that was large enough to take strong, undiluted clay so the vessel could stay upright; he evolved the manufacturing so that it could make sculpture as tall as 90 cm. However, technique is not at the expense of the impression of
the handmade. Subtle changes in vibration, airflow and clay materials can all create imperfections, which Van Herpt embraces. His avant-garde production technique is not all it seems, he makes clear. The Dutch designer still has a small terracotta coil pot he made aged five. Clay layered upon layer, he sees the principles of 3D printed ceramic and the ancient technique of coiling as identical: ‘In that sense I’ve been doing this kind of thing for a while now,’ he says. Van Herpt says 3D printing is a way of simply making thin, complex vessels: and a continuation of the ceramic canon, not an erasure. ‘To me ceramics is a handshake with history,’ he says.
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Van Herpt’s printer drips out clay, building up vessels in the same way that stalagmites form in caves.
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Simplicity
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Simplicity The industrial design graduate invented his own machine to create the ceramic works.
P R I M E C L AY B O DY
Stoneware, earthenware and porcelain PRIME TECHNIQUE
3D printing PRIME GLAZES
None
PREDOMINANT FORM
Vessel, functional ware, design and art 97
New Wave Clay
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Simplicity
FENELL A ELMS
Inspired by the patterns she finds in nature, Fenella Elms’ porcelain wall hangings encourage contemplation by both viewer and maker The location of FENELLA ELMS’ studio in the middle of the English countryside has a huge influence on the porcelain wall-mounted and freestanding panels she creates. Each one is made up of many hundreds of beads or strips ̵ laid out in a painstaking process that can take over a week ̵ to resemble a bird’s feathers ruffling, the direction of grass on a lawn or a shoal of fish swarming underwater. She is fascinated by patterns found in the countryside. ‘I love seeing how the flowers connect. I love looking at how insects build things. We are surrounded by fields with huge flocks of birds coming and going. I can feed on any detail like that ̵ close up details of fishtails and feathers or whatever. I like moving, shifting things,’ she says.
Elms slip-casts each porcelain bead (this can take up to a month) and then slowly and methodically attaches them to a sheet of porcelain or, in larger works, a metal casing filled with cement. She finds herself deliberately half-concentrating to make sure the patterns are neither too stylised nor too haphazard. Elms, who was an occupational therapist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist before becoming a ceramicist, is adamant about the calming visual effects of her pieces and the meditative effect of making them. ‘Repetition and rhythm are calming. It's reassuring to know where something is going but then have the surprise when it shifts a little bit,’ she says. ‘You let yourself be taken.’
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Simplicity Elms produces both wall mounted and freestanding pieces. She took up the craft at an evening class after working for 20 years in mental health care.
P R I M E C L AY B O DY
Porcelain
PRIME TECHNIQUE
Hand building PRIME GLAZES
None
PREDOMINANT FORM
Sculpture and fine art 111
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STR UCT URE Hand-built work made by ceramicists who approach clay as a tool for engineering silhouettes. Not pottery at all, but architecture
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PAOL A PA RONET TO This Morandi-like expert creates powerful still-life landscapes with lightweight, fragile porcelain works made using cardboard
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Structure
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Structure Everyday objects such as bottles and bowls take on a new identity as non-functional design objects. They are recognisable but fundamentally unusable.
To look at, PAOLA PARONETTO’s works appear weighty, sculptural and solid. To the touch though, they are fine, delicate and paper-thin; they ring like tin if you tap them and are incredibly light. This fine balance of the paper clay series has been developed over many years. ‘It is the result of my wish to go beyond old schemes and commonplaces in the field of pottery techniques,’ she says. As a collection, they are Giorgio Morandi-esque still life landscapes. They may be bottle-shaped, but they are largely sculptural pieces of design. They may be made of clay, but they are paper thin. And, while her works might on the surface be seen as investigations into technique, Paronetto
is equally fascinated with colour and decoration. ‘Colour wraps my pieces and creates an interrelation between them. I’m definitely inspired by nature and the continuous change of its colours throughout the season,’ she says. Paronetto first constructs the structures out of cardboard and then drenches them in a specially-made slip mixture, made up of watered-down clay and processed cellulose fibre pulp. The paper component usually makes up 30 per cent of the overall matter. The piece is then fired to a temperature of 1100°C so that the paper burns away, leaving the structure solidified. A third of the structure has disappeared, hence its lightweight appeal.
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Structure P R I M E C L AY B O DY
Paper clay and porcelain PRIME TECHNIQUE
Slip casting, throwing, hand building, coiling, pinching and sculpting PRIME GLAZES
Matt without lead and glazed engobe PREDOMINANT FORM
Sculpture and vessel
Paronetto’s works are made by dipping corrugated cardboard in watered-down clay, which then burns away in the kiln. It is a technique she has refined over many years.
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NOS TA L GIA Vernacular pottery techniques and aesthetic tropes from history that are being re-appropriated by modern day artists
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HITOMI HOSONO
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English botanicals and Japanese flora are brought to life on the highly complex surfaces of London-based Hitomi Hosono’s vessels
An English Daisy and Nadeshiko Flowers Bowl, 2017, moulded, carved and hand-built porcelain with an interior of dancing sprigs, 6 x 13 inches.
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Porcelain
PRIME TECHNIQUE
Carving and hand building PRIME GLAZES
None
PREDOMINANT FORM
Ceramic art
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↑ A Large Orange Coral Bowl, 2014, moulded, carved and hand-built coloured porcelain, 6 x 13.5 inches. ← Hosono’s works are floral displays frozen in time in ceramic form. A Komorebi Tower, 2016, moulded, carved, pierced and hand-built porcelain, 10 x 6.5 inches.
Growing up on a farm in Japan left an impression on London-based HITOMI HOSONO, and fostered in the young ceramicist a love of the natural world. Today, the flowers such as those decorating her pots – daisies, roses and nadeshiko – owe as much to Japan as to the flora of her adopted homeland, England. Similarly, Hosono’s works are influenced by the precision of traditional Kutani ware from Japan, while the creamy, monochrome textures are inspired by Wedgwood motifs. It is east-meets-west on a lavish scale. They are now housed in the collections of the British Museum and the V&A Museum in London, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum in New York and LACMA in Los Angeles.
Of course, gardens like these do not grow overnight. Hosono’s work can take roughly two years to produce. Up to 1000 individual leaves, petals and branches are intricately carved using dentist tools, cast in moulds and then attached to the body. They take between two and six months to dry. Hosono has mastered the art of representing the natural world. She can sculpt leaves sprinkled with rain drops and leaves moving with the wind. Yet these botanical masterpieces mostly lack the one thing gardens are known for: colour. Hosono prefers to celebrate the purity of porcelain. ‘Why?’ she asks rhetorically. ‘They already say so much.’
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Works are so delicate that they are left to dry for sometimes six months before firing.
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HEIDI A NDER SON
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The sun, moon, stars and desert: this Californian potter’s totems are intrinsically linked to the landscape and native history around her
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‘The Native Americans that first lived in California gathered clay from the Mojave desert and Colorado river and made, and continue to make, pots with the elements they found in the earth,’ explains Los Angeles-based ceramicist HEIDI ANDERSON. ‘I’m inspired by their use of design elements as allegory and endeavor to create my own symbolism with my totems.’ Anderson’s pots, vessels and totems are intrinsically linked to the Californian landscape. Their muddy shades steal from the local palette: tobacco, charcoal and sand. The geometric surface decoration – produced using the nerikomi inlay technique – evoke moons, suns, mountain ranges, owls or birds. They are left unglazed, letting the rough texture of the clay speak up.
While these pots are literal displays of the landscape, her totemic figures are evocations of local folk art traditions. They are influenced by the ‘storyteller dolls’ made by the Cochiti Pueblo people native to New Mexico. While the Cochiti dolls have a smiley joviality about them (they are traditionally displayed with open mouths to indicate the stories they are telling), Anderson’s are eerie and wistful. With furrowed brows and tiny mouths, they remarkably embody the mood of the desert. ‘I like the idea of communicating some of what the desert represents: it’s a place that is surrounded in mysticism and a great nostalgia for the mysterious beauty it has,’ says Anderson.
P R I M E C L AY B O DY
Stoneware and earthenware PRIME TECHNIQUE
Throwing and hand building PRIME GLAZES
Iron oxide stain PREDOMINANT FORM
Sculpture and vessels
Anderson’s borrow from folk art traditions and Mexican ceramic art such as The Tree of Life and storyteller dolls of the Cochiti Pueblo people in New Mexico.
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Credits N E W WAV E C L AY Ceramic Design, Art and Architecture PUBLISHER Frame Publishers AUTHOR Tom Morris PRODUCTION Sarah de Boer GRAPHIC DESIGN Barbara Iwanicka PREPRESS Edward de Nijs COVER PHOTOGRAPHY Mia E Göransson, Sunset Platform, 2017, stoneware, porcelain and bone china, 19 x 27 x 26 cm. Courtesy Officine Saffi. PRINTING IPP Printers ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS OF THE AUTHOR In addition to all the brilliantly talented ceramicists, designers, artists and photographers whose work appears in this book, I’d like to thank Martin Brudnizki, Sarah Griffin, Hella Jongerius, Grayson Perry and Edmund de Waal for the time and knowledge they kindly contributed. Thanks also to Jonathan Conway, Corinna Drossel and Rachna Suri for help along the way and to Jon for everything else. This book is dedicated to my dad, Jonathan Morris.
Trade Distribution USA and Canada Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, LLC. 34 Thirteenth Avenue NE, Suite 101 Minneapolis, MN 55413-1007 T +1 612 746 2600 T +1 800 283 3572 (orders) F +1 612 746 2606 Trade Distribution Benelux Frame Publishers Luchtvaartstraat 4 1059 CA Amsterdam the Netherlands distribution@frameweb.com frameweb.com Trade Distribution Rest of World Thames & Hudson Ltd 181A High Holborn London WC1V 7QX United Kingdom T +44 20 7845 5000 F +44 20 7845 5050 ISBN: 978-94-92311-24-5 © 2018 Frame Publishers, Amsterdam, 2018 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or any storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Whilst every effort has been made to ensure accuracy, Frame Publishers does not under any circumstances accept responsibility for errors or omissions. Any mistakes or inaccuracies will be corrected in case of subsequent editions upon notification to the publisher. The Koninklijke Bibliotheek lists this publication in the Nederlandse Bibliografie: detailed bibliographic information is available on the internet at http://picarta.pica.nl Printed on acid-free paper produced from chlorine-free pulp. TCF ∞ Printed in Poland 987654321
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