Lisa Hammond

By AMAY

For the last 28 years I have been making vapour glaze pots. Since setting up Maze Hill Pottery, I have concentrated on producing functional, high temperature soda glaze pots for the preparation, cooking, and serving of food, in the broadest sense of the word.
Raw glazed using slip and a number of firing schedules, the work has a rich pallet of colour and texture.
I have always spent some of my making time producing more individual work, recently after spending 3 months making and exhibiting in Japan, I have spent time developing a range of Shino wares, inspired by my time spent in the Mino area.

Lisa Hammond, Maze Hill Pottery, The Old Ticket Office, Woodlands Park Road, Greenwich, SE10 9XE
Tel: 020 8293 0048 Website: www.mazehillpottery.com
Image: Shino faceted jar 20×14 cm

ROBIN BEST’S New Work with Old Cultures

By AMAY

ROBIN BEST’S SHANGHAI EXHIBITION TITLED NEW Work with Old Cultures reveals the work of an eminent Australian ceramist whose approach is at once cerebral and physical. This is a rather un­usual combination in an artist. Most artists veer towards one or the other, emphasising either the phys­icality of their work or its underlying philosophical or intellectual stratum and subject matter. Moreover, Best insists that her work must move its audience by its beauty. Therefore she strives to create work that will make people feel, that people will experience as beautiful: “That is the secret of successful work – moving people to feel something – you’re striving to make that group of people feel something in response to the beauty.”

On display in Shanghai’s Madame Mao’s Dowry Gallery, this 2005 exhibition is composed of three dis­tinct groups of work that show an artist at the height of her powers. The first group, collectively entitled Open Cut, relates to the Australian landscape, to the con­tours of human body and to the Chinese tradition of fine pottery. The second, modestly titled Marine Forms, has been inspired by the minutiae of Australian underwater sea life. Finally, Best’s Sky Forms com­prises new work that the artist has made since her arrival in China in August 2004. In the case of each sep­arate body of work, location has exerted a complex Ceramics: Art and Perception No. 61 2005 and multi-layered influence. It is also worth noting that these three separate although interconnected bodies of work collectively cover the dominions of sky, earth and sea.
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Jennifer Hall

By AMAY

Jennifer Hall set up her first studio pottery in 1997, she now pots in her studio at home in mid-Wales.

The forms of her contemporary domestic pottery are driven by their function. These forms with their decoration are products of Jennifers enthusiasm for her rural surroundings. The work is also informed by baroque architectural details, the Arts and Crafts movement and by potters both past and present.

Her aims for the slip-decorated earthenware are to make it a pleasure to look at, touch and use, to enliven the most mundane rituals of taking nourishment and to compliment the most delicious meals.

Jennifer Hall, Spring Gardens, Llanwrthwl, Llandrindod, Powys LD1 6NU
Tel: 01597 810119 Website: jennythepotter@hotmail.com
Image: Mustard and honey pots 8.5×13cm

History of Tiles

By Porcelain

Tile… An Italian Tradition

The use of Italian tile began in the Middle Ages when ceramic tile became a useful architectural medium for the decoration of walls and floors in religious and public building. The tiles, mostly hand decorated majolica, had their origin as a local handcraft. The local artisans, in turn borrowed from the hexagonal terracotta tiles prevalent in the late Roman Empire, and other medieval decorative tiles. By then, Islamic and Moresque tiles had also been introduced to Christian Europe. Italian majolica handcrafters developed new styles, adapted from those types, to fit the changing modes and patterns of interior deco-ration in both public and private buildings.

 

Tile by Cedit, Milano;
designer Ettore Sottsass,
1968. Wall tile

One of the first tile floors designed by a known artist, was in the chapel of S. Petronio in Bologna in 1487. It was designed by Pietro Andrea da Faenza and the use of the medium by him quickly became known. Afterwards tile usage spread rapidly in religious buildings, palaces and villas throughout Italy. In Southern Italy, artistic ceramic first was used in Sicily, during the Baroque period.

 

Tile by Appiani, Oderzo;
designer Pompeo Pianezzola,
1968. Wall tile
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CERAMIC TILES OF ITALY ANNOUNCES 2007 DESIGN COMPETITION WINNERS

By Porcelain

Confindustria Ceramica and the Italian Trade Commission are pleased to announce the winners of the 2007 Ceramic Tiles of Italy Design Competition. A record breaking number of projects, particularly in the commercial category, were submitted to the competition this year. The rich and diverse pool of applicants serves as an example of the wide usage of Italian tile in the US market and illustrates how this material can be specified for any installation.

An international jury considered the overall design of the space as well as how the tiles met their functional and technical requirements. After an intensive selection process, two projects were given the highest prize in the Commercial category. Ellerbe Becket, Inc was selected for their innovative tile application in the atrium of the Target Northern Campus. The testani design troupe and CMD Architects won for the state-of-the-art Evensong Spa. Honorable Mentions in this category went to HGA (Hammel, Green and Abrahamson Inc.) for their contemporary design of the General Mills, James Ford Bell Technical Center and Divison1 Architects for the attention to detail and the sophisticated charm of the Charlie Chiang’s Restaurant. In the Residential category, Vanessa De Leon Associates won for the streamline minimalism and glamorous details of the Old Tappan Residence, New Jersey. This year, the jury gave Honorable Mentions in the Institutional category to Architectural Alliance for the colorful Phoenix SkyHarbor Airport Terminal 4 Redevelopment and Cero Design & Built for three public works entitled In Dreams of Giants, Blacks with Wings, and Ceremonial Spiral.

Commercial Winner: Ellerbe Becket, Inc
Project: Target Northern Campus, Building D Atrium
Tiles: Caesar
Tile Contractor: Harrison Tile Company
Distributor: RBC Tiles & Stone (Minneapolis, MN)

When the nationally recognized retail giant Target embarked on the expansion of their Northern Campus, located in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, their intent was to create ‘the best corporate campus ever’. Ellerbe Becket, one of the United States’ largest architecture/interiors/engineering/construction firms, was charged with the task of creating a sense of community and a campus environment similar in quality to the Target offices in downtown Minneapolis.
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American Art Clay Co., Inc. Products - Ceramic Clays

By Porcelain

ALL AMACO® CLAY BODIES ARE FREE OF NEW YORK STATE TALC!

Amaco® offers twelve different ceramic clay bodies: six low fire and six high fire including our new low fire Brown Stone Earthenware No. 29! Eleven of these clays are 100% talc-free with No. 20 Versa Clay containing ACMI approved Texas talc. Use this link for a complete list of talc-free AMACO® clays.

Our advanced system of clay handling and processing results in superior clays that are consistent with every batch. Their compositions have been exactingly formulated to ensure exceptional quality and maximum plasticity along with a wide range of textures and colors. Amaco® clays are widely used by beginners, professional potters, and in ceramic art programs worldwide.

Michael Geertsen’s Assemblages

By piggle

LOOKING AT THE WORK OF THE YOUNG DANISH ceramist Michael Geertsen in exhibitions in Copenhagen, Liverpool and Chicago, as well as in his dusty atmospheric studio, has made me think hard about how ceramics are displayed. This is because Geertsen’s work is, in itself, about display. His work is an interrogation, a questioning of the place that ceramics has inhabited, as well as the place ceramics will inhabit in the future. At their most basic his ceramics are assemblages of thrown, cut and rearranged forms, glazed in hard primary colours, and placed in strange and exacting positions. They exist in a world between the still life and sculpture, the cusp between imagined utility and brokenness. What I find intriguing in Geertsen’s ceramics is that they seem to enact many of the most problematic issues facing contemporary ceramics, without becoming bombastic.

This was certainly true of Geertsen’s solo exhibition in 2004 at the Museumsbygningen in Copenhagen. His assemblages hung on the walls in vertiginous ways. They hung at wildly different heights, so that you were constantly surprised by looking up or down into pieces: your control of sight lines, or of how you met the work was challenged. It reminded me of what the American art theorist Rosalind Krauss has written of Postmodernism’s museum without walls. She wrote of “the sudden opening in the wall of a given gallery to allow a glimpse of a faraway object, and thereby to interject within the collection of these objects a reference to the order of another. The pierced partition, the open balcony, the interior window – circulation in these museums is as much visual as physical, and that visual movement is a constant decentring through the continual pull of something else, another exhibit, another relationship, another formal order, inserted within this one gesture which is simultaneously one of interest and of distraction: the serendipitous discovery of the museum as flea-market.” This sense of decentring movement, common to the architecture of Zaha Hadid or Daniel Liebeskind, was the feeling of this particular exhibition.
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Kaete Brittin Shaw

By piggle

“My functional work in cast porcelain is inspired by the spiral.”

“Casting involves pouring a liquid clay, called slip, into a plaster mold. The original models for the molds were created from thrown cylinders cut on an angle and joined. New designs have been developed from taking sections of earlier pieces and re-assembling them. In this way the shell bowl morphed into a butter dish and sections taken from a column vase became a sake set.”

“The stacking bowls give the impression of a spiral when they are stacked and they reflect my continuing interest in the integration of functionalism with sculptural form. As individual pieces they are utterly functional, but when they are stacked they assume sculptural qualities.”
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Blue Tiger Maple Base

By JDZ-Ceramic

Presenting a gift of Steuben on an inscribed base makes your gift truly one-of-a-kind and conveys a very special message to the recipient. Many of Steuben’s designs include a base which may be inscribed with a name, a date of an event, a corporate logo or a brief message. For designs that do not include one, an optional base may be purchased and customized to your specifications.

Wave glass vase

By JDZ-Ceramic

One of three elegantly understated vessels in Muehling’s new Wave Series, this tall blown glass vase has a sheared rim that recalls the fluid line of a rolling wave. It is a splendid foil for long-stemmed blossoms or flowering branches of plum, cherry, or forsythia.