1. Ceramics
2. Are
3. Fun
2. Are
3. Fun
➝ Art Practice
Sundays are for ceramics
The joys (and pains) of ceramics are endless. My ceramics practice mostly happens on Sundays. The ceramic pieces are often integrated with climbing rope, with which I’m completely obsessed with and have a serious collection of in my studio. The mishima technique allows me to introduce drawing to clay. I am learning to make glazes, and wheel throwing is starting to make sense. Lustres are neat. I’m starting to pigment my slipcasts. Ceramicists know: this will all take a lifetime to figure out.
*Some pieces pictured here were made at the Banff Centre in 2018 as part of a visual art residency, where I discovered ceramics.
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The joys (and pains) of ceramics are endless. My ceramics practice mostly happens on Sundays. The ceramic pieces are often integrated with climbing rope, with which I’m completely obsessed with and have a serious collection of in my studio. The mishima technique allows me to introduce drawing to clay. I am learning to make glazes, and wheel throwing is starting to make sense. Lustres are neat. I’m starting to pigment my slipcasts. Ceramicists know: this will all take a lifetime to figure out.
*Some pieces pictured here were made at the Banff Centre in 2018 as part of a visual art residency, where I discovered ceramics.
2023 ---
Adolf Loos once wrote that "the time spent on embellishment of objects is wasted time and wasted health of the maker". It is apparent that Loos was not able to experience the mediative contentment of creating repeating marks, of going where your curiosity guides you, and creating intuitive pieces rooted in experimentation. To restrict ornament is to limit joy.
Many of my sculptures are only complete when woven through with ropes and cordage, introducing an unexpected element of machine-made readymade materials into craft pieces. Allowing for the everyday world to intermingle with craft is an expression of my reality, and invites the viewer to contemplate how familiar materials can be repurposed into the unexpected, and how we can see our material world in a different way.
Adolf Loos once wrote that "the time spent on embellishment of objects is wasted time and wasted health of the maker". It is apparent that Loos was not able to experience the mediative contentment of creating repeating marks, of going where your curiosity guides you, and creating intuitive pieces rooted in experimentation. To restrict ornament is to limit joy.
As a designer, I have been trained in clean and modernist visual ideas, and as an artist and ceramicist I have chosen to break out of this mould. I seek visual balance between ornament and simplicity, and my ceramic sculptures are plain in shape and wild in markmaking, colour and drawing. The sculptures are a thought frozen in time, and I think of them as a slice of preserved energetic motion. Perhaps they are a portal to another universe? Beginning with torn paper collage, I combine layers of lines, freehanded cloudy contrasting glaze forms and gold lustre at random onto the slipcast forms. In using a geometric ceramic form as a structure for erratic surfaces, I allow myself endless experimentation within basic shapes. I decline to leave simple forms with simple surfaces.
Many of my sculptures are only complete when woven through with ropes and cordage, introducing an unexpected element of machine-made readymade materials into craft pieces. Allowing for the everyday world to intermingle with craft is an expression of my reality, and invites the viewer to contemplate how familiar materials can be repurposed into the unexpected, and how we can see our material world in a different way.
