When I told people that I was going to Spain for a film festival devoted entirely to ceramic culture, the response typically involved the raising of eyebrows. The notion might well seem on the extreme side of “niche,” but the “CICEMA Festival Internacional de Cinema Ceràmic de Manises” is exactly what it says it is. It was not a playlist of YouTube videos on how to trim a pot, this was a professional festival, with a collection of sponsors, a submission process that brought in 60 candidates from 18 nations, a selection committee, a jury and multiple awards. Organized by Carlos Garcia and Rafaela Pareja, with a host of volunteers, this was the third time the event has been held.

Films were organized into multiple categories. There were several documentaries focusing on the tradition of a particular region or artist, like Oropesa y el Collar de Perlas (“Oropesa and the Pearl Necklace”), which showcased rural figurative ceramics in Chile, or Tras las Huellas del Barro Andalusi (“In the Footsteps of Andalusian Pottery”), which explored how the cultural identity of the region has been shaped by a now-fading but ancient ceramics tradition. Another, “After Celadon” by ceramic film pioneer Tan Hangyu went in a different direction, exploring how several celebrated artists both in and outside China are bringing new ideas to celadon (and ceramics in general). If these attempts at capturing different traditions can be placed at one end of a spectrum, on the other end were “Experimental” films of artists using clay as an inspiration for performance through movement or narrative. In one, “Exuvie”, a woman slowly descended through a house filled with Egyptian symbols, entering rooms where she was handed intricately carved vessels by a mysterious priestly figure. In another, Coreografia de un Crecimiento, (“Choreography of Growth”), a woman in a billowing nightgown maneuvered, danced and jumped among clays and ceramic objects before being covered in slip by an older, Aquarius-like figure. In the Italian short “Aeon” (my favorite in this category), abstract ceramic forms were presented like so many asteroids or planetoids in a science fiction film, in extreme close-up, slow-motion shots of their textures as they slowly moved through a pitch-black space. There were also a few animated films, but not in the big-budget “Claymation” style we have become familiar with. These were humbler but often effective creations using the malleability of clay itself to express larger ideas. A real highlight in this regard was a lecture on ceramics and animation focusing on absurdist master Jan Švankmajer, which included a screening of some of his unrivaled ceramic animations (and if you have not heard of this guy you should look him up immediately!). There was even a work of fiction, a touching and unpretentious film about an elderly former ceramic instructor slowly losing his memory. His adult granddaughter, herself at a crossroad in life, reintroduces him to his studio and encourages him to teach her, and the two both grow as a result. This film, La Niebla (“The Fog”), ended up winning the Audience Choice award.

The penultimate screening was the Grand Jury Prize Winner from the 2024 Sundance festival, “Porcelain War” (directed by Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev). This is a powerful film about a small group of ceramic artists in Ukraine who find themselves caught up in the war effort, becoming soldiers who pilot drones or teach others on the use of machine-guns. The impossibility of their situation, one day literally killing waves of doomed Russian soldiers and the next trying to return to a few days of normal life, is presented through high-production camera work and imaginative animation. It raises impossible questions and provides a never-seen-before perspective on the realities of contemporary warfare.

The festival closed with three very well-made short student films, two from India and one from Spain. The winner told the story of Kutchi pottery from the province of Gurarat, with images of weathered men crouched before wheels effortlessly throwing difficult shapes that have been part of their heritage for centuries. But it also revealed how these artisans are caught in the grip of contemporary economic realities, uniting them with films from earlier in the festival about pottery in Spain.

In hindsight what stuck with me the most were exactly these sorts of films documenting fading pottery traditions of different regional neighborhoods. To be fair, the films were each nuanced and unique, but given my poor Spanish and the blur that tends to happen at any film festival, they tended to merge into episodes from a single series, an attempt to capture a beloved history before the people who could still tell its story before it disappear. We watched many elderly, heavily accented potters talking about how things were in their “old days,” when there was a high demand for locally made terra-cotta pottery, like the “cantir” vessels that were taken into the fields to help keep the water cool. Image after image crossed the screen of men and women looking at the shambles of former wood-fired kilns or workshops and reflecting on how things used to be before economies of scale moved production to larger, modern factories, and plastic came to replace the ceramic vessels that had been used literally for hundreds of years.

This struck me as perhaps a European feature, the urge to capture the past, even the recent past, for most films were talking about things that happened not long ago, within a generation or two. As someone now living in the US, it got me thinking about American ceramics history, and their traditions and institutions. Notably absent from the festival was a North American presence, which, while heavy on Spanish films, also featured work from Italy, India, Norway, China, Switzerland, France, Germany, Argentina, Chile and the Ukraine. We Americans may not have the depth of ceramic history as Europe (nor, obviously, that of Asia), but not one of the films I saw were about the events of hundreds or thousands of years ago. They were about parents and grandparents, about recent generations and living memory. Surely we all have these, and our own neighborhood studios and institutions and traditions. Americans have the Archie Bray and Watershed, and Alfred and Black Mountain College, and North Carolina and Santa Fe, and NCECA, we have Binns and Volkous and Woodman and indigenous ceramic practices and any number of stories about ceramics impacting communities in all kinds of different ways across the country. I’m sure much of it has indeed been documented here and there at one point or another, but I still wonder who are, and who will be, the tellers of these stories down the road? If nothing else, my weekend in Manises convinced me that these stories, in this format, are valuable and important, and a festival celebrating international ceramic traditions and our shared love of clay is not really so “niche” but in fact really important, particularly given our painfully complex international political situation. With video technology so omnipresent, and at least as easy to learn as wheel throwing, there doesn’t seem to be any reason why we, whoever we are and wherever we might live, can’t all start using cameras to create new stories about our communities, our unsung heros, and our unique traditions.

The fourth iteration of the Cicema International Ceramic Film Festival will take place in 2027, as it is transitioning to a biannual format. If I’m fortunate enough to attend once again I hope I will find an even more diverse collection of countries represented.

More information on the festival itself, along with previews of many of the films, can be found on the festival’s website.

Note: For anyone actively working in this area, or more generally interested in ceramic filmmaking in any genre, please feel free to contact the author at evansb@alfred.edu, or festival organizer Carlos Garcia at cineceramico@cicema.com.

Benjamin Evans is The Wayne Higby Director and Principal Curator of the Alfred Ceramic Art Museum in New York. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from the New School for Social Research in New York and an MFA in Mixed Media from the University of Calgary.

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Photos by Javier Marina

The Latvia International Ceramics Biennale is gradually becoming one of the most significant ceramics events not only in the region, but also in Europe. This is evidenced by the growing interest among artists and their desire to be part of the biennale. Its extensive programme, curatorial work, distinguished selection committee and critical reception all contribute to the image of a promising and important event.

In 2025, the Latvia International Ceramics Biennale presented its fifth edition, consisting of a variety of exhibitions. Alongside the main juried Martinsons Award exhibition, dedicated to honouring one of Latvia’s most important ceramic artists, Pēteris Martinsons, the programme features numerous solo and curated displays. The winner of the previous exhibition is invited to present a solo show at the Rothko Museum. In 2025, it was Lithuanian artist Milena Pirštelienė with her exhibition Matchstick in the Sand. Here she presents small cube-shaped ceramic objects (an important element for emphasising craftsmanship), which serve as a basis for recording her everyday memories — a slow documentation process that becomes a form of personal therapy.

In recent years, the biennale has also expanded geographically. In addition to the main exhibitions, other cities have hosted events such as Fresh – New Voices in Latvian Ceramics, a showcase of young Latvian ceramicists, and Windless, a Baltic ceramics exhibition featuring artists from Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. As a guest exhibition within the biennale’s framework, the Rothko Museum also presented works by ceramicists from the The Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław, Poland, titled Lost for Words. Thus, the autumn ceramics season in Latvia was truly impressive, stretching across both time and visual experiences.

The 5th edition theme, From Stardust to Lush Sprouts, embraces the journey from primordial beginnings towards further development – much like the creative process from idea to physical form. According to the curators (Valentins Petjko and Aivars Baranovskis), it also reflects clay as a material that has accompanied humanity from its origins, first as a fundamental tool for development and later as a medium for artistic expression. This transformation from primal imagery to contemporary contexts — including feminist narratives and the depiction of woman as a creator of the universe (inspired by Marija Gimbutas’ archaeomythological research) — can be seen in the work of U.S. artist Denny Gerwin. His Venus is a depersonalised and furious (yet restrained) female figure. Simple chamotte clay combined with wood firing references ancient cultural foundations, while the clearly expressed, declarative pose of the hands signals resistance to persistent gender stereotypes.

The exhibition showcases works of highly diverse themes, ranging from figurative to abstract. Understandably so – from nearly 1,000 applications, the international jury selected 80 artists. Thus, participation alone is a considerable achievement. Ceramics from 30 countries are included. As this is a competition, winners were selected in both the international and national categories. The concept of first, second and third prizes was abandoned, and instead gold, silver and honourable mentions were awarded.

The gold prize in the international category and the title of best artwork of the year went to Polish artist Daria Kowalewska for her piece Violent Existence. It is a highly expressive yet monumental work, evoking a slightly unsettling image of a mysterious creature. According to the artist, the work conveys strength and energy. The form – or imagined creature – grows, expands and seeks to occupy as much space as possible, demonstrating boundless vitality. Kowalewska is accustomed to creating complex, multi-part, large-scale compositions. Her palette is typically subdued, echoing natural clay colours and further emphasising organic qualities. Her artistic interests revolve around material transformation and decay, drawing inspiration from natural forms.

Latvian artist Elina Titane follows similar creative principles, and she received an honourable mention for her work Dreamers. In her creative process she prioritises playful exploration rather than rational explanation, searching for connections between materiality, intuition, visual expression and inner sensibilities. Her organic forms are inspired not only by nature but also by fragments of everyday life. Titane emphasises the inherent qualities of clay and therefore usually avoids using glazes – as she has also done this time.

Silver prizes in the international category were awarded to Hanna Miadzvedziava and Hyunjin Kim. Miadzvedziava has received numerous awards in recent years, including the Faenza main prize at the 63rd Premio Faenza. Her work Hot–Cold War explores the fine balance between outward calm and inner turmoil. Through its spiky, viscous forms and colouring, it expresses the tension accumulating in these turbulent times – tension ready to erupt at any moment. Meanwhile, South Korean artist Kim’s piece also examines the complexity of emotional worlds, but focuses more on the emotions themselves and how they interact. The piece weaves a labyrinth – emotions overlap, intersect and form intricate structures and layers. The turbulence of these times, like dark clouds, also appears in Valdas Kurklietis’ From Darkness to…. The artist holds onto the idea that although the present feels unpredictable and frightening, light – or at least its reflection – always emerges, sustaining belief in the ultimate triumph of good.

Part of the exhibition features works combined with non-ceramic materials, or use techniques that diverge from those typical of the medium. For example, another honourable mention recipient, Guglielmo Maggini, presents a bright pink creature (something between a living being and an organic natural form) that blurs the line between life and death. Through the combination of natural (clay) and synthetic (resin) materials, the artist explores themes of historical and personal memory. Like Kowalewska and Maggini, several artists address themes of growth and transformation through strange, slightly unsettling creatures, as seen in Agnė Šemberaitė’s Totem, Michał Żesławski’s Fused Together, and Kristīne Niedrāja’s The Firstborn. Particularly organic and sensitive forms characterise Eglė Einikytė-Narkevičienė’s Between Different Worlds. Her works are full of drama and powerful emotional intensity. Drawing on Baroque ideas, the artist examines the eternal conflict while juxtaposing it with the search for harmony. Her vibrant colouring and striking plasticity distinguish her from many others and make her work recognisable on the international ceramics scene.

There is also no shortage of humorous works that charm with their playfulness, lightness and sometimes ironic intent. Elements of humour can be found in works by Krisaya Luenganantakul (Thailand), Kauri Kallas (Estonia), Agate Kalcenaua, Laima Lauriņa, Zahars Ze, Rūdis Pētersons and Vita Valdmane (Latvia). As can be seen, many such works come from Latvian artists.

In the national category, two artists received the gold prize: Lilija Zeiļa and Inese Brants. Both are representatives of an older generation with long-standing experience in the field. Zeiļa presents Burnt Landscape, a rhythmic work without a clear beginning or end, full of repeating elements. This is exactly her aim – to create the impression of boundless space. The familiar palette of deep red, black and grey, and the sheen achieved through terra sigillata technique, are immediately recognisable. She draws inspiration from traditional Latgalian pottery and, of course, from nature. By combining traditional techniques with contemporary forms (a hallmark of her work), she reflects on destruction and rebirth.

Inese Brants is widely known in Latvia as a master of porcelain and decals, and is considered one of the country’s most significant creators. Art historian Dace Ļaviņa even compares her to Pēteris Martinsons, so it is no surprise that Brants was awarded the main prize in the national category. In addition to actively participating in local and international exhibitions, she also works in porcelain research and is one of the organisers of the Latvian International Porcelain Painting Symposium.

Not only the piece exhibited at the Martinsons Award, but Brants’ entire artistic practice aligns closely with the biennale’s theme. Her artistic trajectory connects past and present, aiming to create a link between them and leave a trace for the future. Like Zeiļa, Brants addresses time: it does not stand still, it does not disappear, yet always carries emotional weight. Yesterday’s events become today’s memories, and thoughts of tomorrow manifest as dreams. Everything is interconnected and cannot exist without the other parts.

Alongside conceptual strength, her work is characterised by exceptional technical mastery. She is particularly interested in re-using old decals from the now-defunct Riga Porcelain Factory in a contemporary context. She often incorporates found historical objects into her artworks: old factory decals or, in her latest series, historical photographs. Using contemporary technologies, she transforms these historical artefacts for present and – she hopes – future generations. The work exhibited at the biennale, A Tribute to the Brass Bands of the First Independent Latvian State, combines historical narrative, modern technologies and current global events. It depicts early 20th-century Latvian freedom fighters – members of military brass bands. The orchestra is chosen as a symbol of emotional strength and unity, striving for independence. In today’s context, echoes of the past gain renewed relevance, resonating not only with Brants herself, but also with other artists. The connection with the author’s historical roots is also conveyed through the work’s color scheme. Surfaces lavishly decorated with gold and platinum lustres gleam and radiate luxury, and this brilliance is drawn from Latvian folk tales. It is also her personal way of honouring key historical figures through what she excels at most – the demanding and delicate techniques of porcelain decoration, where corrections are almost impossible. Brants also undertook meticulous research, selecting the best photographs from 12 Latvian museums, processing them, creating decals via silk-screen printing and finally hand-painting them to produce the remarkable A Tribute to the Brass Bands of the First Independent Latvian State series – truly deserving of gold.

It is practically impossible to describe every artist in such a rich exhibition. This article aims to highlight the works particularly noted by the jury. Yet it must be stressed once again that the exhibition abounds in remarkable technical solutions, diverse ideas and outstanding craftsmanship. The biennale’s theme is also excellently reflected in the physical presentation of the works and exhibition design. The interplay of light and shadow not only highlights individual pieces but also creates an overall atmosphere, where individual elements merge into a cohesive portrait of the Latvia International Ceramics Biennale.

Aurelija Seilienė is a Lithuanian art critic and curator working mainly in ceramics. She earned her Master’s in History and Theory of Arts from the Vilnius Academy of Arts. Seilienė published numerous articles in the cultural press, compiled catalogs, and wrote introductory articles. She participates in ceramic conferences and also works as an expert in various exhibition selection commissions and project financing programs.

Martinsons Award, the International Juried Exhibition of the 5th Latvia Ceramics Biennale, is on view at the Rothko Museum in Daugavpils from September 5, 2025, to February 1, 2026.

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Photos by Didzis Grodzs

With Ceramics un-limited world, the Südtiroler Künstlerbund opened the doors of its exhibition space SKB Artes in Bolzano to a vibrant exploration of clay in all its forms. On view from August 29 to November 7, 2025, the show brought together a carefully curated selection of artists whose works highlight the boundless potential of the material. Ceramics un-limited world invited visitors to reflect on clay’s enduring presence in art and culture, tracing its meanings from ancient traditions to contemporary interpretations and into the future.

To reach the exhibition, visitors passed through a courtyard and ascended a staircase before entering the historical rooms. In this transitional outdoor space stood a white-glazed Rococo tile stove, a technical and artisanal masterpiece long retired from its original function. Gracefully positioned in the courtyard, it set the tone for the exhibition by evoking our most immediate associations with clay – the domestic, the functional, the everyday object. The stove also served as the site of an intervention by artist and stove builder Peter Chiusole (*1958), who transformed the area into a small working and advisory studio during the run of the exhibition. On a wooden shelf, he combined historical fragments with his own handcrafted pieces – glazed roof tiles, shards of architectural ceramics, vases, and miniature models of tiled stoves – while a small replica of the Rococo stove joined the display. Once a week, he guided visitors through the construction, use, and artistic design of historical and contemporary tiled stoves, offering insights, demonstrations, and personal stories that connected the objects to Alpine craftsmanship and cultural history.

Upon entering the exhibition rooms, visitors were greeted by a shelving unit filled with small sculptures and vessels by various artists, showcasing the diversity of the ceramic medium – and, just beside it, a festively set table. The 25 soup bowls drawn from a private collection subtly referenced another familiar aspect of ceramics: their presence in daily life and domestic rituals. This intimate scene was complemented by wall decorations created with patterned rollers by Luis Seiwald (*1969). For these, he used terra sigillata that he had personally extracted from a clay quarry in the Valle di Casies in Northern Italy. In this first room, Seiwald also set up a small production area where visitors could follow the process step by step – from collecting clay in the quarry to the countless stages in between. His practice illustrates how a raw material becomes a finished ceramic object through skill, time, and meticulous refinement.

Following Seiwald’s exploration of transformation, Julia Schuster‘s (*1989) contribution shifted the focus from process to sensation, emphasizing the intimate physical engagement with the material. Her video-documented performance LONGING (2026) shows the artist’s hands shaping and kneading raw clay. The work becomes a metaphor for sensuality and for the traces left by the human body in the act of forming, inviting viewers into a tactile experience that foregrounds how we perceive the world through touch. It is astonishing how a material so soft and malleable can acquire a solid and lasting presence – one of the many wonders of ceramics. Another of Schuster’s works, FOLDING (2016), charmingly demonstrates this transformation: the wall-mounted piece appears to crystallize the intuitive shaping process. The impressions of the artist’s hands remain inscribed in the form, telling the story of her movements, with a fleeting gesture made permanent through firing and a white glaze.

Just as other forces act on clay beyond the shaping hand, Julian Burchia‘s (*1989) Bewegtes Blau (Blue in Motion) (2018) explores how time and chemical processes leave their mark. The work consists of 30 individual impressions of roof tiles, their colors shifting from shimmering copper to deep luminous blue – the result of oxidation in the Raku technique, in which the firing time of each object was deliberately extended by ten seconds. Hung in a row, the tiles evoke the changing hues of the horizon during the “blue hour,” when the sky transforms from moment to moment. The controlled timing in the firing process produces similarly subtle variations, creating a dialogue between natural and technical rhythms.

In the following rooms, the exhibition revealed how contemporary ceramics deliberately challenge and subvert expectations of materiality. Beate Gatschelhofer (*1994) created large-scale wall compositions that merge hand-building techniques with 3D printing. The pastel-colored forms of her series Verzögerung als schlechter Zeitvertreib (2023, 2024), connected by neon straps, point to non-linearity and to processes in which progress unfolds through detours, pauses, and repetitions. The forms appear to sink into the straps, giving an impression of softness despite their ceramic material. Helene Kirchmair (*1981) likewise plays with this shift in perception, transforming what is originally soft and pliable into its opposite. Her Salvagente (2018), a group of small porcelain lifebuoys stacked in a corner, turns a rubbery object into something solid, fragile, and unexpectedly delicate. In her wall piece Velvet (2018), Kirchmair continues this exploration of material confusion: arranged into a pictorial object, cup handles evoke a textile structure, deceiving the eye and reimagining what ceramics can be.

The exhibition returned to the theme of material instability with Frank Louis‘ (*1966) works Cumulus humilis (2017) and Cumulus mediocris (2015). Entering a room painted deep blue, visitors found themselves among a field of small clouds perched on fine steel structures. Clouds are long-standing symbols of imagination and projection; everyone knows the experience of watching formations shift from animals to fantastical beings in seconds. They stand for transience, yet Louis renders them solid and fixed, playing with this contradiction. And clouds, one might think, should float – but here they rest on the ground, further destabilizing expectations. In German, the expression “Schäfchenwolken” links sheep and clouds, and indeed these ceramic cloudlets could almost be read as a small herd. Each cloud bears the name of the high-pressure system that passed over Austria, Louis’ home country, during its creation, tying each one – Ingrid, Kathrin, Britta – to a specific moment in time. Additional clouds hang on the walls, strapped down by safety belts. With gentle humor, the work restrains a symbol of freedom, hinting at the human desire to grasp the ungraspable, to preserve the transient, to resist nature’s fundamental truth: that everything is in flux.

This notion of continual transformation also resonates with Tom Marseiler‘s (*1989) porcelain sculptures from the neophyt nectar series (2025). These constructed assemblages carry within them the processes of joining, breaking, and reordering. They are animated by contrasts – fine and coarse structures, colorless and pastel elements – revealing moments of experiment and inquiry. Rather than mastering the clay, the works expose its shifting potential. They evoke transformation and ephemerality, reminiscent of futuristic organisms that might begin to move at any moment. A similar creatureliness inhabits Marseiler’s Bandits (2022–25), dark stoneware sculptures whose rough, almost volcanic surfaces evoke a primordial materiality. Positioned directly on the floor, they require visitors to bend down to meet them at eye level; their presence is archaic, intimate, and quietly affecting. These sculptures formed one of the many highlights of the exhibition.

Another major focal point was the work of Elmar Trenkwalder (*1959). His vertically striving ceramic structures exceed the dimensions of conventional kilns and evoke the ornamental richness of Asian temples as well as the exuberance of Baroque basilicas. In the catalogue, they are described as “baroque fusions of thought” brought by the artist to “mental vividness.” Even the smaller-scale pieces shown here inspire awe: layer upon layer reveals extraordinary technical mastery and an imaginative choreography of beings and ornaments. Biomorphic shapes merge with architectural elements; everything grows together. The glaze reinforces this cohesion, making the sculptures appear as if poured in a single gesture and heightening their vitality. Diverse cultural influences, memories, mythical creatures, animal forms, and ornamental motifs blend into a single entity, prompting reflections on origins, interconnectedness, and the idea that we are part of a vast whole composed of countless long-preceding elements. The experience recalls standing before historical architectural masterpieces – temples or cathedrals – marveling at human imagination and craftsmanship.

In contrast to Trenkwalder’s imposing ceramic towers stood the work of Edith Berger (*1997). Here, wonder arose not from scale but from dedication to the small. Ab-wesen (2024) consists of a delicately hand-crocheted headpiece into which tiny wedge-shaped porcelain elements are integrated. It forms a fragile mesh of yarn, wire, and porcelain, quietly asserting its presence on a small wall-mounted shelf. The piece recalls forms of head adornment found across many cultures. The head sculptures Frauenkopf (2023) by Sergio Sommavilla (*1951), similarly modest in scale, also possess a distilled expressiveness. They evoke the character of archaic artifacts encountered in ethnological displays. Sommavilla’s faces feel classical and timeless, their reduction lending them an elemental, ever-present quality. Traces of modeling animate their surfaces, while layers of engobe add further depth.

This reduction and careful modeling found a different expression in the work of Clara Mayr (*1993). Her plaster casts of pigs undergo subtle transformations, shifting from animal to human forms. The pig heads of Fockenkopf (2025) derive from casts taken from the two sows with whom the artist lived for several years. The heads reproduce the animals’ features with exact fidelity. Fired using the Raku technique, their surfaces bear cracks, scorch marks, and irregular glazes, giving them a vivid, almost living presence. In the subsequent wall pieces, subtle changes appear: the shape of the ears shifts, eyelashes emerge, a gentle smile spreads across the faces – gradually giving the heads a distinct expression that hints at emerging human features. As the series Mutationen (2025) progresses, these mutations continue until the heads take on floral or seed-like forms, merging natural and human elements in uncanny yet poetic ways.

Formally, these evolving shapes almost segue into the work of Lucia Pizzani (*1975), although her material and visual language clearly diverge from Mayr’s. In Pizzani’s wall installation Escritura (2020), some forms recall the floral realm or leaf-like structures, while others evoke tools or masks. Their surfaces carry the imprint of dried corncobs. Playful and archaic at once, the composition brings together shapes drawn from nature and culture – forms become signs, and signs become carriers of meaning, even as their significance remains open. A comparable openness characterizes Die Wege entstehen im Gehen (2025) by Veronika Thurin (*1964). The eight sculptures displayed on a wooden platform share a similar overall structure, yet each is distinguished by unique surface decorations and applications. Some of these additions subtly resemble microbial, fungal, or bacterial growth spreading across a terrain, creating a quiet resonance with the nature-inspired forms elsewhere in the room. The sculptures exude an air of mystery, as if bearing secret messages that resist deciphering.

As the exhibition drew to a close, the note of humor and irony that had been present from the beginning came to the fore in the work of Josef Rainer (*1970). In the shelving display at the start of the exhibition, visitors encountered the playful series My private art history: Klein Josef bestaunt ein Werk von… (2024–25), in which Rainer engages wittily with art history. A miniature “little Josef” sits opposite towering figures of contemporary art – such as Sarah Lucas, Thomas Schütte, or Antony Gormley – marveling at their works, setting the tone for the light-hearted commentary that threads through Rainer’s practice. This humorous approach culminates in Die Jury (2023), presented as the final work in the exhibition, inside a cabinet illuminated by rhythmically changing colored lights. Five bottle-shaped figures, formed in Rainer’s unmistakable style, gather in a semicircle, scrutinizing a central abstract sculpture with quiet, comic seriousness. Their verdict remains open, playfully reflecting the decision-making processes of the art world and raising the perennial question of how objective such judgments can truly be. This playful scenario resonates with the exhibition itself: just as Rainer’s jury deliberates, the curators faced the challenge of selecting works from a vast field of possibilities. Their choices – evident in the rich diversity on display and the meaningful dialogues between works – speak for themselves. The exhibition not only highlighted the versatility of the ceramic medium but also demonstrated a refined curatorial sensibility. It presented a rich and well-balanced overview of contemporary ceramic practice – carefully assembled, engaging, and resonant.

Artists: Edith Berger, Julian Burchia, Maria Burger, Daniela Chinellato, Peter Chiusole, Maria Delago, Beate Gatschelhofer, Helene Kirchmair, Frank Louis, Tom Marseiler, Clara Mayr, Josef Rainer, Julia Schuster, Luis Seiwald, Sergio Sommavilla, Corinna Theuring, Veronika Thurin, Elmar Trenkwalder, Lucia Pizzini

Curators: Eva Gratl, Eleonora Klauser Soldá, Lisa Trockner

Katherina Perlongo (b. 1989 in Bolzano, Italy, lives in Berlin) is Curator at the KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art in Berlin and co-founder of the curatorial collective CUCO – curatorial concepts berlin. Most recently, she was Director ad Interim and Curator of Outreach at Georg Kolbe Museum. Currently, she is researching topics at the intersection of contemporary art, craft and design.

Ceramics un-limited world was on view between August 29 and November 7, 2025, at Südtiroler Künstlerbund’s SKB Artes space in Bolzano, Italy.

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Photos by Gustav Willeit

At the core of Gordon Baldwin’s practice lies a tireless curiosity: among the most original voices in modern British ceramics, the artist was able to transform a traditional language into a territory of formal and poetic experimentation. After his demise in May 2025, Baldwin leaves behind a vast body of work. His practice is nourished by a continuous dialogue with art history, especially that of the later twentieth century. In a life spent between teaching – at Eton College as well as Goldsmiths College and the Royal College of Art – and artistic research, Baldwin began experimenting by directing his practice toward works with a functional character, until shaping the traits of a fully autonomous sculptural investigation that reveals him as a multifaceted artist, capable of weaving sculpture, drawing, poetry and music into a single coherent vision.

The exhibition Little Hard Clouds Becoming Vessels, held at Fondazione Officine Saffi and organised in collaboration with Kunstverein in Hamburg and Corvi–Mora, London, presents itself as a retrospective dedicated to Baldwin’s rich practice. Since its founding in 2011, the Milan-based foundation represents a key institution for ceramic research, fostering dialogues between historical perspectives and future-oriented experimentation, so it is no coincidence that Baldwin’s first exhibition takes place here in particular. The project investigates the wide range of visual and conceptual styles the artist developed over many decades, moving between abstraction, reflection, and a deep attention to how materials behave. Word, form and silence are in constant dialogue, creating compositions where inner experience and outside reality come together.

The display presents a large selection of ceramic sculptures arranged without chronological order across three central platforms, each composed of steel plates supported by bricks. This simple arrangement gives the works an almost floating quality, letting their shapes and shadows seem suspended, like small clouds or pieces of a hanging landscape. Alongside the sculptures, a concise group of drawings from 2016–2017 introduces a second register of Baldwin’s late production, revealing how drawing eventually became his primary form of expression.

Varying in shape and size, the structure of the ceramic works recalls the typical shape of the vase or container, with surfaces marked by holes, gaps, and narrow openings, giving the impression of an interior that is partly exposed and partly concealed. This repeating morphology represents a basic key element, to the point of becoming a key theme of the artist’s research: the so-called vessel, which appears in many titles of his works, and corresponds with a hollow structure embodying the idea of inner and inhabited space. Often glazed in black, the heart of the sculptures becomes a fragile space where thoughts and emotions gather, forming the protected and complex center of the human experience.

While black evokes secrecy and introspection, accessible only through fine splits in the surface, it also generates a sense of protection and quietude. The dark core becomes a welcoming space, capable of absorbing complexity and sheltering vulnerability. The outer surfaces, on the other hand, often feature neutral or bright glazes and traces of decorative or gestural marks, which lighten the heaviness of the dark interior. This contrast between the dark inside and the bright outside highlights the boundary between what is personal and what is shared, between hidden depth and visible form. Baldwin’s works often evoke an ambivalent response. While the viewer is free to project personal visual memory onto the forms, they may also consciously inspire a second, darker, and more mysterious voice. Baldwin himself acknowledges this emotional duality:

Silence, in particular, is understood by the artist as a form of creative suggestion: where silence exists, form has not yet emerged, and it is precisely in that suspension that the possibility of creation lies. This idea is vividly embodied in a 1988 photograph by Fi McGhee, published in Crafts magazine alongside an interview by Tanya Harrod. The image depicts Baldwin surrounded by his works in his studio, absorbed in quiet dialogue with the objects that, in turn, seemed to guide his hand. The atmosphere reflects the thoughtful approach behind his work, showing how each piece developed from a careful connection between the material, the space, and his inner rhythm.

Throughout his career, Baldwin cultivated a close bond between visual form and written word: from his earliest studies, poetry was an enormous reference, leading him to produce a significant number of poetic texts presented in the new catalogue Inscape, published by Kunstverein in Hamburg and Edward Hutchison, which for the first time places side by side the two art forms that most inspired him.

Nature plays a central role in this dialogue between poetry and form: Baldwin’s early writings often evoke the sea, wind, rocks, and coastal landscapes. These elements later return in his sculptures through smooth shapes, textured surfaces that recall worn stone, or dark glazes that suggest volcanic cliffs. The landscape becomes both a real and symbolic starting point, a place where the outer world meets inner reflection. It is no coincidence that the context of the United Kingdom, where Baldwin lived and worked throughout his life, plays a decisive role in his research. Among the most significant places is a beach in North Wales, renamed by him The Place of Stones, discovered almost by chance but destined to become a pivotal point of his creative vision: the rocks, of murky and sinuous forms and large dimensions, serve as mirrors for the creation of various shapes; the dark, volcanic color of the cliffs inspired his important exploration of black glazes, whose shiny or matte finishes create different effects, making the works look as if they were made from different materials.

Baldwin’s works, particularly those with more rounded shapes, were usually made by hand first and then further shaped with molds. The firing process was often repeated many times, as he fired the piece and then added new layers of glaze or pigment, and put it back in the kiln, repeating this until he achieved the material and visual qualities he wanted. Central to this methodology is the concept of inscape, coined by the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and adopted by Baldwin as a conceptual pillar. Defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the unique inner nature or essence of a person, place, or thing”, the inscape describes how inner essence manifests outwardly in a tangible form. Baldwin’s works, whether sculptural or written, can be seen as physical manifestations of inner landscapes: containers for what is most intimate, complex and irreducible.

Every surface of the sculptures bears traces of his creative process: rather than smooth or polished, they keep incisions, cuts, faint lines that testify to their making. These marks record the artist’s total abandonment of functionality in his objects. From the late 1950s onward, Baldwin moved decisively away from functional pottery toward an approach that embraced an art-oriented gaze. His artistic formation took place during a period of significant transformation in British sculpture. In the early 1950s, Herbert Read described a new generation of postwar sculptors under the label Geometry of Fear, identifying works distinguished by tension, fragmentation and existential unease. Teachers such as Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull exposed Baldwin to this environment, which encouraged him to see ceramics not as a separate craft tradition but as a medium capable of engaging directly with contemporary sculptural concerns.

Among the works on display, Tall Standing Form, signed and dated 1985, exemplifies these influences with particular efficiency: with its vertical tension and deep blue glaze, the work assumes an anthropomorphic presence, almost recalling a totem. The work Developed Bottle (1989), part of a series begun in the 1960s, engages explicitly with Umberto Boccioni’s Sviluppo di una bottiglia nello spazio (1912). While Boccioni’s Futurist object dissolves into the surrounding environment through its dynamism, Baldwin’s interpretation keeps a clarity of outline, maintaining the vessel as a self-contained yet expressive form. Several works belong to the series Painting in a Form of a Bowl, began in the 1980s, where Baldwin further explores the boundary between ceramics and painting. Here, the vessel becomes a support for marks, colours and gestures, blurring distinctions between the two media and reinforcing the harmony between surface and structure.

In Little Hard Clouds Becoming Vessels, the sculptures engage in dialogue with a group of charcoal drawings on paper. The graphic production, although often preparatory, always joined his creative path, eventually becoming his main expressive language in later years as his eyesight deteriorated, leading him to abandon ceramics and continue creating by drawing. The drawings are distinguished by abstract creations composed of pencil lines, material gestures and shades made with fingertips. Brief verbal notes accompany most drawings like marginal annotations to the visual composition.

The charcoal drawings reveal a close connection between the artist and contemporary music: word, action and musical rhythm enter perfect harmony; the rhythmic graphite gesture creates a visual musicality made of signs and words that follow each other like improvised scores. His final phase of research echoes the silent melodies of John Cage (as in the celebrated piece 4’33’’), and the minimalism of Philip Glass and Terry Riley was a major source of inspiration.

Not a Sound (2017) shows this contrast: the silence suggested by the words coexists with a rhythmic and almost musical gesturality. Again, in Counting One Two Three (2016), the act of counting introduces a temporal sequence similar to rhythm, and the fingerprints, though they may seem casual, reveal a musical structure.

With the loss of one of the most important senses for an artist, sound and gesture became in his final years the privileged expressive channels, allowing suspension and silence to become active spaces of emotional and conceptual resonance, places in which meaning settles and amplifies.

Alessandra Lami is an independent art historian based in Milan, Italy, with a specialisation in contemporary art. Holding a degree in History and Criticism of Art from Università degli Studi di Milano (2024), her research centres on current artistic practices and the critical frameworks that inform today’s visual culture.

Gordon Baldwin: Little hard clouds becoming vessels was on view at Officine Saffi, Milan, between October 3 and December 3, 2025.

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Captions

• Gordon Baldwin. Little hard clouds becoming vessels, installation view at Fondazione Officine Saffi. Courtesy Fondazione Officine Saffi. Photo: Alessandra Vinci

“Tremore Essenziale” at the Alfonso Artiaco Gallery in Naples represents the Belgian artist’s return to Italy after his masterful exhibition at the Villa Medici in Rome in 2020-21. A more intimate and personal vision is created at the Neapolitan gallery as opposed to the Villa Medici show that provided a retrospective of Creten’s sculptural production from the 1980s onwards. Whereas Villa Medici’s “Peccati” was conceived by the artist as a gift to the eternal city, this show is a homage to Naples, the city of tremors par excellence.

A poem written by the artist serves as a billet-doux to Naples, overshadowed by the silhouette of Vesuvius, whose historic eruptions are so often paired with earthquakes, starting with the tremors that preceded the most famous eruption of the volcano in 79 AD. Creten relates these tremors to the fragility of clay and the creative process, but also to the fear that comes from confronting taboos.

Known as the ‘gypsy ceramicist’ for his itinerant practice spanning almost 40 years, Creten recently settled in Paris at “La Solfatara”, the studio he shares with the visual artist Jean-Michel Othoniel. The choice of the name is telling. One of more than 40 volcanoes in the Campi Flegrei to the north of Naples, the Solfatura was identified by Strabo in the Roman early imperial age as the entrance into the underworld and home to the god Vulcan, the master craftsman. Creten explains: “The Solfatara was a place where people undertaking the Grand Tour went to write their poems, and it was an environment where one could see the future, through a connection with the underworld and the unknown.” (source). If the Solfatara was an obligatory site on the 18th-century Grand Tour, the designation also suggests the personal Grand Tour of the artists, residents at the French Academy in Rome in 1996. Moreover, Vulcan is evoked by the previous life of the building as a metalworks.

The viewer enters into contact with Cretan’s work already from the courtyard of the palazzo. Two gold bars, “Specchi dorati” (Golden mirrors), framed cross-like in the central window of the gallery already entice the visitor with their luscious surface treatment to enter into Creten’s constructed world. Like much of the work presented in the gallery, the mirrors are the latest incarnation of a well-loved imaginario of the artist. First presented in the Meyer Gallery in NYC in 1988 and included in the Villa Medici show in a more expected silver version, here the reflective surface of the gold-lustred pieces takes on a spiritual significance. Other “mirrors” positioned around the gallery serve to reflect the viewers as well as the works.

As a self-taught ceramist, Creten is resistant to the traditional constraints of ceramics, which he sees as too restrictive. He moves with ease between extremes: the minimalism of the “mirrors” and the baroque extravagance of the majority of the works on display. This juxtaposition is nowhere more apparent than in a comparison of the “Mirrors” with the “Gloria” series. Shield-like concave ovals, titled respectively “La Gloria – E avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma (and before him all of Rome trembled)”, citing Tosca, and “La Gloria Subliminale (Subliminal Glory)”, reflect the divine and also light, in this case, facetted by the elaborate surface treatment composed of multiple modules that portray the rhythmic pulsations of natural genesis.

Conceived as the central focus of the show are free-standing and wall pieces from the series “Odore di Femmina” that has been a recurrent theme since Creten’s residency at the Villa Medici in the 90’s. Words are important to Creten, as evidenced by this title, which refers to both Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” and Dino Risi’s film “Profumo di Donna”. It is here that Creten is at his most expressive. The precision of construction of the voluptuous folds of the flowers is enveloped as if in a caress by the lusciousness and sensuality of the glazes. In the poem composed as an integral part of the show, Creten writes:

I tremble, and it feels as though the building, the ground, and the entire earth tremble along with me. When I first began shaping delicate, fragile clay into flowers, my hands were already shaking.

The emotion, the dizziness of taboo – transforming a material so dirty, damp, yet so fertile and full of possibility into those seemingly untouchable, fragile flowers – led me to this series: Odore di Femmina.

One rose painting, subtitled “Il germe della libertà” (the seed of freedom) is transitional between the pure gold of the “Mirrors” and the “Gloria” series. Here the lustred surface is shattered through the intrusion of an opulent circular section that vibrates in hues of yellow and pink. In the other two bas-reliefs on display, the lustre becomes a minimalistic subtext to the black surface in “Vulva – Continente Nero – La Stupenda” (Vulva – Black Continent – the Studenous), whereas it is more eloquent in the figure-eight form of “La Ferita” (The Wound), articulating the berry-like elements and escaping in a broad swath on the left.

The two free-standing figures, posed on bases glazed in primary colours, occupy the centre of the gallery. Composed like the rose paintings of multiples of flowers, they cite the fragmentary naked Venuses of Classical antiquity, torsos that are headless, armless and legless. In these works, difficult themes such as sexuality, the other and race are rendered more digestible by clothing them in pure beauty. One, “La Luminosa – La Solfatara” (the luminous – the Solfatara” is bright yellow, perhaps a reference to the sulphuric gases emitted by the volcano. Intrusions of other colours on the back of this figure are a poetic expression of the interior, hidden from the first glance of the viewer. Here gold lustre appears anew flanked by the rose glaze already in the rose painting, subtitled “Il germe della libertà” (the seed of freedom). In the turquoise torso titled “These are the springs”, bright primary red of the base is echoed in the yellow and red of the swath of colour that extends from the shoulder.

Social injustice is the focus of the series of “Perla Nera”, is which a disembodied head nestled between the two halves of a shell, is both revealed and concealed. As in Creten’s poem, it represents “an existential crossing, filled with fear and hope”. The three heads are distinguished by variations in the visibility of the head and the surface treatments.

Some works of Creten, in their universality, can take on new significance in each exhibition. Whereas the series “Points of Observation” in the Villa Medici serve as the bearers of the names of the 7 mortal sins of the show’s title “Peccati”, here they take on a maritime significance. Incised with lines that recall the latitudes and longitudes of navigational maps, they encourage the visitor to “anchor” themselves as if tied to a boat pier and to contemplate the various elements of this exhibition.

Creten’s show at the Alfonafo Artiaco Gallery is a vision in gold and vibrant colour, reflecting our world and encouraging the viewer’s reflection on crucial issues.

Lori-Ann Touchette is the co-founder of C.R.E.T.A. Rome, an international center for ceramics and the arts in Rome, Italy. An American art historian with degrees from Brown, Princeton, and Oxford Universities, she has taught and worked in the administration of several British and American study-abroad programs since moving to Rome in 1997. She is the author or editor of several articles and books on Greek and Roman art, as well as the 18th-century Grand Tour. Touchette has also contributed numerous articles on historical and contemporary ceramics to Ceramics: Art & Perception and other international ceramics magazines, and has written critical texts for international exhibitions.

Johan Creten: Tremore Essenziale was on view at Alfonso Artiaco, Naples, between September 11 and October 31, 2025.

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Captions

• Featured image: External view, Johan Creten, Tremore Essenziale, 2025, Alfonso Artiaco, Napoli. Courtesy Alfonso Artiaco. Photo: Grafiluce
• Exhibition view, Johan Creten, Tremore Essenziale, 2025, Alfonso Artiaco, Napoli. Courtesy Alfonso Artiaco. Photo: Grafiluce
• Exhibition view, Johan Creten: Tremore Essenziale, 2025, Alfonso Artiaco, Napoli. Courtesy Alfonso Artiaco. Photo: Grafiluce
• Johan Creten, Specchio dorato #3 #4, 2022-2023, gold luster on glazed stoneware, 40.5 x 107 x 9 cm. Courtesy Alfonso Artiaco. Photo: Grafiluce
• Johan Creten, La Gloria Subliminale. Courtesy Alfonso Artiaco. Photo: Grafiluce
• Johan Creten, Odore di Femmina – Il germe della libertà, 2025, gold lustre on glazed stoneware, 81 x 61 x 19 cm. Courtesy Alfonso Artiaco. Photo: Grafiluce
• Johan Creten, Odore di Femmina – Vulva – Continente Nero – La Stupenda. Photo by Lori-Ann Touchette
• Johan Creten, Odore di Femmina – La Ferita. Courtesy Alfonso Artiaco. Photo: Grafiluce
• Johan Creten, Tremore Essenziale exhibition view with 3 “Odore di Femmina”. Courtesy Alfonso Artiaco. Photo: Grafiluce
• Johan Creten, Odore di Femmina – La Luminosa – Solfatara, 2025, gold lustre on glazed stoneware, 72 x 40 x 30 cm, base 38,5 x ø 80 cm. Courtesy Alfonso Artiaco. Photo: Grafiluce
• Johan Creten, Perla Nera – Mare Profondo. Courtesy Alfonso Artiaco. Photo: Grafiluce
• Exhibition view with “Odore di femmina” torsos. Johan Creten, Tremore Essenziale, 2025. Courtesy Alfonso Artiaco. Photo: Grafiluce

Jupiter+ is an ambitious off-site programme run by Jupiter Artland in Scotland. The brainchild of Jupiter’s co-founder, the sculptor Nicky Wilson, it aims to bring world class art out of the gallery and into high streets across Scotland. Now in its fourth year, the programme has previously run in Perth (2022), Ayr (2023) and Paisley (2024). In the 2025 offering, housed in a disused estate agent in Reform Street at the heart of Dundee, Lindsey Mendick’s new installation Growing Pains: You Couldn’t Pay Me to Go Back catches the eye and interest of passersby young and old. In this former retail unit, reimagined as an immersive multi-sensory artwork, the creative use of public space enables the opening of dialogue and issues an invitation, to young people in particular, to imagine themselves as artists. Crucially, Jupiter+ runs a bespoke learning programme in the high street too, providing opportunities to develop critical thinking, collaboration, creative activism and self-development. Jupiter’s Youth Collective ORBIT runs in conjunction with Jupiter+, bringing together young people for a year-long, youth-led programme that has the potential to transform lives.

Growing Pains, an idea and installation that Mendick has called “the estate agents from hell”, draws in new audiences and inspires the next generation of creative practitioners. Mendick’s autobiographical work offers a form of working through, asking the viewer to explore their own personal histories, however difficult that may be. In a previous commission for Jupiter Art Land, Mendick installed Sh*tfaced (2023) in Jupiter’s Steadings Gallery where her ceramic tableaux captured the indulgence and aftereffects of binge drinking culture. Other installations on the site at that time – Shame Spiral and I Tried So Hard to Be Good, also dealt with restraint and abandon and the theme of self-destructive tendencies at play. Now in Growing Pains, Mendick revisits her teenage years through ceramics and film. In so doing, she creates a space for today’s teenagers to talk about what is important to them, about their fears and emotions, hopes and dreams.

At first glance, Growing Pains looks like a typical estate agent. One window is completed covered with advertising showing suburban houses rolling down a leafy hill with the London sky scape beneath. Look closer, however, and you will notice the face of a spotty youth, Disembodied teenage mouths filled with brace work and colorful butterfly hairclips float across the vista. In the other window, advertisements for houses for sale hang in three vertical lines, supported by fine metal link chains that echo the aforementioned brace work. Each advert shows a smart middle-class house with the unnerving text beneath it – Growing Pains: You Couldn’t Pay Me to Go Back There. Something is awry here. Inside the office nothing is as you would expect. A series of half a dozen or so ceramic doll’s houses are set atop pedestals so that visitors can walk around and between them. Glazed in murky shades of browns and greens, each house is purposely cracked open and an array of objects burst forth from within, conveying something of the uncontainable pressures that teenagers face in contemporary times. The fashionable training shoes of Mendick’s youth, a mobile phone, hair straighteners, cigarettes, empty bottles of alcohol, computer game consoles, makeup and items of underwear populate these dilapidated houses, turning what could be a house of dreams into a house of nightmares that seems to be on the verge of dereliction. It’s a troubling scene made even more so when you watch the associated film in the adjoining space where Mendick drives around the areas she grew up in, sharing stories with the viewer. There is no question that Medick’s experience of her teenage years was traumatic for all sorts of reasons. It is an incredibly emotional film and one that shares the uniqueness of her experience while, at the same time, showing the common emotional trials all teenagers share.

What took Mendick to art school in the first place is no mystery. She tells me that at secondary school in north London she benefited from forward thinking art teachers and, from the age of 14, never wanted to do anything else. The rise and reputation of the Young British Artists at that time made anything seem possible. With typical honesty, Mendick confesses to feeling alone and ashamed as a teenager. It was discovering the work of Tracey Emin, she says, that saved her. In 1995 Emin made her now-famous work Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–95. The teenage Mendick made Everyone I Have Ever Kissed, and so began an artistic career that has truly reimagined what ceramics can do, and become, as a critical medium for contemporary art.

Working initially with air drying clay, Mendick didn’t fire her first ceramics until she was 27 years old at the Royal College of Art. While nervous about stepping outside her own boundaries of experience, she has never looked back. She is constantly learning and using different clays, pushing herself and it as a medium. “I think I must be addicted to the constant failure of it”, she says laughing. There is, of course, a battery of troubleshooting, glaze testing and such like to attend to in the process of making, but as Mendick explains: “when you’re an artist, very rarely do you have that, voila, like when a baker opens the oven and suddenly you have all these croissants from nothing. As an artist, you see so much of the process, it’s really hard. But then when I open the kiln, and something I’ve made is finished, I’m able to experience it as a viewer. I think I’m just addicted to that rush”.

As for the medium itself, there is no other medium that is so intrinsically hand to heart for Mendick. Her work is deeply emotionally invested. Mendick again: “everything that I experience in the studio is so diaristic. I can go into the studio and create something that’s based on what’s just happened to me that day. As my work is about diary and autobiography, it seems that these ceramic objects are entities, forged from myself. With ceramics, I feel I’m creating something from nothing. When I go into the studio, it’s really meditative and I can just lose myself in it. I think it’s been really important to me because it has slowed me down quite a bit”.

Mendick has been open about her own battles with mental health and I wondered how difficult it might be to work things though in clay and then reveal them to the world, particularly in Growing Pains which deals with such a vulnerable and difficult stage of life. Mendick shares that she has grown up unable to shake off much of that teenage pain.

“I’ve been waiting probably 10 years to make this show and thinking there’ll be a right time when it doesn’t prick my eyes, talking about some of the things that happen. But then I realised that it was more important to talk about a subject that still feels so raw”. The unresolved nature of Mendick’s teenage troubles prompts us to discuss how some things never leave us. It is with her typical generosity that Mendick explains how, for her, the work connects to these difficult emotions. “One of the reasons it’s so great with Jupiter+ is that this isn’t just a show, it’s a springboard and that’s what I believe art should be. I want the works to be conversational, conversation pieces about difficult things that we have to say to each other. I make like no one’s watching, but I needed something like Jupiter+ to be able to take on the complexity of it as a story”.

The technical challenges of working with clay in this way are considerable. Making the houses in Growing Pains was most challenging of all. A team of people had to carry them to the kiln. Mendick always liked the idea of them cracking, playing with the idea of bursting out the scene, if you like. “I was thinking about how teenagers punctuate everything. You create a life, and then you cannot control them. I think that was what was what was happening with my parents. I think quite often, we go through all of that and we think, but if I had kids, I could do it better. But you can’t, you can’t control it”. There is a sense of that lack of control with ceramics and with Mendick too as she points out “I do think you have to collaborate with your kiln”. That said, there is nothing organic or intuitive about Mendick’s process. Ceramic may be the protagonist with the show built around it, as Mendick puts it, but she is always thinking and planning what is next in the process. She has created an enormously raw, honest and generous artwork here. What is next for Growing Pains depends upon the young people of Dundee.

Beth Williamson is an art historian and writer specialising in modern and contemporary art in Britain, with a particular interest in art education, craft, and ceramics. A former Research Fellow at Tate, she co-curated the exhibition Basic Design at Tate Britain in 2013 and has written widely on British art and pedagogy. Her essays and reviews on art, craft and ceramics have appeared in publications such as The Art Newspaper, Sculpture magazine, Studio International, and Ceramic Review.

Lindsey Mendick – Growing Pains: You Couldn’t Pay Me to Go Back is on view at Jupiter+ (Part of Jupiter Artland), Dundee, between September 12 and December 21, 2025.

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Captions

• Lindsey Mendick, Growing Pains, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and JUPITER+, Dundee. Photography by Ruth Clark, except otherwise noted

It has been a busy mid-October week in London with Frieze coinciding with neighbouring PAD, located a short 20-minute walk away from Regent’s Park in Berkeley Square, and newer programming like Minor Attractions. You may be unfamiliar with this younger London-specific art fair, “Minor Attractions,” now in its third year, that aims to connect contemporary art and nightlife. Its current and previous editions took place at The Mandrake, with both local and international galleries exhibiting artworks in rooms on several moody levels of this eccentric luxury hotel. I visited all four of the other fairs (four rather than three, as I will be differentiating between Frieze London and Frieze Masters) and found the ceramic works at Frieze London 2025 the most exciting.

One of the booths there, as part of the ‘Focus’ selection that forefronts young galleries, was Stockholm-based Coulisse, which made a statement with mint-green walls accompanying a solo presentation of punchy works by artist Rafał Zajko. I had previously visited two of Zajko’s solo exhibitions in London: Clocking Off at Queercircle and Song to the Siren at Cooke Latham Gallery. While Zajko would definitely not be identified as a potter or ceramicist, his practice chiefly features ceramic components in recent years. He employs many types of sculptural materials and this background comes through in the works at Frieze. Blue Origin (2025) and the Kosmos series (2025) move beyond a simple tile-based format. Metal fittings and brass components thread through the ceramic forms and there are several layers that create an overall depth to the composition.

His work speaks a clear mechanical and architectural language that feels simultaneously retro and futuristic. Each of Zajko’s works is like an alien weapon begging you to press a button that will trigger the launch of a missile, or maybe just launch into song. It is therefore fitting that one of his large sculptures, Amber Chamber III (2025), that features a terracotta-tile interior, was activated throughout the fair’s duration by the artist himself and fellow artist Agnieszka Szczotk.

Another strong solo presentation of ceramic works was made by the gallery Modern Art and artist Sanya Kantarovsky. The booth was occupied by a Goliath plinth to bolster and guard the freestanding vessel-sculptures with slab paintings hung on the surrounding walls. Kantarovsky’s practice centers on painting while working across various materials, but his works here were exclusively in clay. He masterfully demonstrates how to best make use of the innate characteristics of simple oxides. His painted figures are such a perfect balance of eerie and tender that I can imagine Tim Burton on a waitlist for these works except that, according to curator and journalist Judith Benhamou, they all sold on the opening day.

I was not surprised to find Modern Art promoting ceramics as they represent several sculptors working in clay, such as Ron Nagle, Eva Rothschild, and Nicolas Deshayes. I am surprised, however, to find such wonderful ceramic works by a painter who is a new disciple to the kiln gods. I may be mistaken, as this is just from my Internet sleuthing, but it seems that Kantarovsky first exhibited similar ceramic vessel-sculptures alongside works by other artists with Modern Art at Art Basel only a few months earlier. Modern Art describes their Frieze London offering as a solo presentation but it’s possible that the wheel-thrown forms may have been made by a ceramicist named Aleah Taylor, who is credited as a collaborator and teacher to Kantarovsky in a recent post on the painter’s Instagram. If I had been given the opportunity to pick up one of the larger pots, I would have had a better grasp of whether Taylor threw them or if a talented painter like Kantarovsky is a natural at throwing on the wheel (unfair!).

Three other booths at Frieze London featured almost exclusively ceramics. London’s own Corvi-Mora often exhibits contemporary ceramics, and their Frieze booth included works by Sam Bakewell and Matthew Warner. The Pit came from Los Angeles to present works in clay by Maryam Yousif, Jennifer King, and Viola Frey alongside a painting and drawing by Frey. Richard Saltoun Gallery took a similar approach by presenting works by nine women artists working in clay and a pair of watercolor paintings by Jacqueline Poncelet. By showing 2D works on paper or canvas alongside an otherwise ceramic-specific presentation, The Pit and Richard Saltoun Gallery highlight the dialogue between the medium of clay and a larger art practice.

This is akin to how Lucio Fontana’s works were exhibited at Frieze Masters this year and the year before (as well as possibly in prior years, but I cannot vouch for these renditions). There was a strong connection made between his ceramic plates and his famous slashed paintings. I personally enjoy seeing how an artist’s voice develops across decades and mediums. On the topic of Fontana, Robilant+Voena presented some lovely examples of his work across painting and sculpture at Frieze Masters. I think this was also the gallery that had a breathtaking Fontana made of polystyrene, a 3 x 4 panel of twelve tiles accompanied by a photograph that depicted how the work had once been installed on a ceiling.

Other treats at Frieze Masters included several works by Lucie Rie presented by both Offer Waterman and Erskine Hall & Coe, and a vase titled Kaze (Wind) (1990s) by Fukami Sueharu shown with Thomsen Gallery. Kaze features a flawless application of a seihakuji glaze that pools on a rectangular ledge, the only horizontal face on an otherwise cylindrical form, while crisp porcelain edges peek out from beneath the glaze like icy mountain ridges.

Similarly, skillful craftsmanship was found at PAD London, a fair occurring here and in Paris that showcases art and design. Some galleries at PAD will showcase more art pieces but visitors would likely agree that PAD is generally geared towards selling designed objects. There is a lot of furniture, mirrors, and lighting, so it’s easy to just find yourself dreaming of an alternate universe in which your home is free of Ikea and Dunelm.

Perhaps this is the reason I find myself disassociating more at PAD than at Frieze. The art world tends towards a more spare display, allowing the viewer to appreciate a singular work for its aesthetic, process, and meaning. Most of the booths at PAD are showrooms and they are selling you a package: this patinated silver-leaf table would pair exquisitely with a stained oak cabinet with blown-glass details. I think the objects and my nervous system need more room to breathe. This silver leaf table also contains multiplicities of aesthetic, process, and meaning!

The quality of work at PAD is undeniably impeccable. You will not see ceramic glued to anything here, which I did see at Frieze London… And when speaking about quality ceramic art objects, we must make sure to mention Adrian Sassoon, who was representing leading contemporary ceramicists such as Felicity Aylieff, Pippin Drysdale, and Kate Malone in their booth. I visited Adrian Sassoon’s space in Belgravia ahead of PAD with a friend visiting from out of town to see their relatively new space. We learned that Sassoon has long-standing connections with Australia, which helps explain his strong ties to the ceramics and glass scene there, despite operating primarily in the UK and his specialized background in French Vincennes and Sèvres porcelain.

Meanwhile at Minor Attractions, an award for expertise in ceramic works would most definitely be given to Scottish artist Becky Tucker, a sculptor represented by the gallery Fabian Lang. I have seen Tucker’s signature forms, humanoid figures with outfits of armor and wiggly tongues, around London. She was exhibiting several new sculptures at Minor Attractions. My favorite was a lizard with only three pairs of ears for facial features titled Reverb (2025).

Due to the nature of the venue, Minor Attractions has some limitations with installation. That being said, there were ambitious takeovers by London’s Plicnik Space, which exhibited a life-size cabin occupying almost their entire room at The Mandrake Hotel, and Estonian Kogo Gallery presenting photographs by artist Kristina Õllek that are crusted in natural salt from Camargue, France. These sculptural photographs were hung from medical tubing in the bathroom and shower stall. The most successful exhibitors at Minor Attractions get creative with site-specific presentations, making use of the limitations involved in temporarily installing work in a five-star hotel.

In the process of writing about these fairs and the works I saw, I have been interrogating my own reactions and opinions. I am spoiled for choice when it comes to seeing art here in London, as well as in Seoul, so I gravitate towards what I find original. So what makes an artwork exciting? It’s funny that as a hands-on maker, or perhaps because I am a maker, I find it appealing when everyday objects are appropriately used within an artwork to amplify its meaning. A work that exemplifies this for me is a wall-based blown-glass work titled Stem (IV) (2025) by artist Gabriele Beveridge, which was shown at Seventeen Gallery at Frieze London.

I could not imagine a twin-slot shelf strip and bookends being used the same way at PAD despite the high technical finish of this work, and let me be clear, that is a pity. If everything at PAD is bespoke, then it therefore loses its connection to the world. Beveridge’s practice, on the other hand, employs found objects such as shop fittings and posters with blown glass in order to explore the relationship between human bodies and the cosmetic industry of contemporary urban environments. The message behind her work is more potent because it employs pre-existing structures. I do not implement this strategy in my own practice (yet!) so do as I say, not as I do.

With time to reflect as I transition back into my regular routine, I can appreciate the benefits of having so many art events clustered into a short amount of time in central London. I overheard someone, likely a collector, at PAD complaining about all these fairs and having to zip off to Art Basel Paris soon after. This spiel is not new as it seems that the value of art fairs is not what it used to be. I like to think that the art fair format is kind of like a party: it’s good to be able to see all your friends at once, efficient for sure. But as an introvert, I’d rather meet a friend at a quiet cafe (gallery) and talk one-on-one.

Unu Sohn is an artist and ceramicist based in London. She holds a master’s degree in ceramics from the Royal College of Art.

Frieze London, Frieze Masters, PAD London, and Minor Attractions all took place in London in October 2025.

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Captions

• Coulisse Gallery, Frieze London 2025. Images courtesy of the artist and Coulisse. Photographed by Graysc studios.
• Sanya Kantarovsky, Modern Art, Frieze London 2025. Courtesy the artist and Modern Art © Sanya Kantarovsky. Photo: Modern Art
• Sanya Kantarovsky, Bonehead, 2025, stoneware, oxides, glaze, 30.5 x 24.1 x 24.1 cm / 12 x 9 1/2 x 9 1/2 in. Courtesy the artist and Modern Art © Sanya Kantarovsky. Photo: Modern Art
• Sanya Kantarovsky, Parasol, 2025, stoneware, oxides, glaze, 20.3 x 19.1 x 19.1 cm / 8 x 7 1/2 x 7 1/2 in. Courtesy the artist and Modern Art © Sanya Kantarovsky. Photo: Modern Art
• Sanya Kantarovsky, Luda, 2025, stoneware, oxides, glaze, 20.3 x 17.1 x 17.1 cm / 8 x 6 3/4 x 6 3/4 in. Courtesy the artist and Modern Art © Sanya Kantarovsky. Photo: Modern Art
• Corvi-Mora, Frieze London 2025. Artists: Sam Bakewell, Alvaro Barrington, Brian Calvin, Che Lovelace, Jennifer Packer, Jem Perucchini, Anika Roach, Tomoaki Suzuki, Matthew Warner and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Courtesy Corvi-Mora, London
• The Pit, Frieze London 2025. Photos by Damian Griffiths
• Richard Saltoun, Frieze London 2025. Courtesy of Richard Saltoun London, Rome and New York (c) Kristof Jeney.
• Robilant+Voena, Frieze Masters 2025. Photo: Chloe Rosser
• Lucio Fontana, Soffitto: Concetto Spaziale, 1957, tempera, engravings and holes on polystyrene, 200 x 300 cm. Robilant+Voena at Frieze Masters 2025. Photo: Chloe Rosser
• Lucio Fontana, Robilant+Voena, Frieze Masters 2025. Photo by Hugo Glendinning. Courtesy of Frieze
• Robilant+Voena, Frieze Masters 2025: ceramics by Lucio Fontana. Photo: Chloe Rosser
• Fukami Sueharu, Kaze (1990s). Courtesy of Thomsen Gallery
• Adrian Sassoon at PAD London 2025. Images courtesy of Adrian Sassoon, London. Photography by Yosuke Kojima.
• PIK’D, PAD London 2025. Images courtesy of PIK’D, Beirut
• Becky Tucker, Reverb, 2025, Glazed stoneware, 7.00 x 50.00 x 24.00 cm, 2.76 x 19.69 x 9.45 in. © The artist. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Fabian Lang. Photo: Becky Tucker
• Kogo Gallery at Minor Attractions with a presentation by Kristina Õllek, London, 2025. Photo by Kristina Õllek
• Kristina Õllek, Evaporating Sea no. 1, 2024. Inkjet prints with grown sea salt from Camargue (pigments, transparent hose, sea salt). Edition of 1/3 + 2 AP, 40 × 33 cm. Kogo Gallery at Minor Attractions with a presentation by Kristina Õllek, London, 2025. Photo by Kristina Õllek
• Gabriele Beveridge, Stem (IV), 2025. Hand-blown glass, steel bookends, 150 x 40 x 40 cm. Photo by Damian Griffiths. Copyright Gabriele Beveridge. Courtesy of Seventeen, London.

If you walk down William Street in inner-city Sydney before November 19, you will see a majestic ceramic work in the window of Australian Design Centre. Standing nearly one metre tall and aptly titled Apparition, it has a whimsical and dream-like quality, with coloured glass bubbles emerging from a white ceramic structure perched on four legs. It represents the first experiments combining glass and clay by acclaimed Australian ceramic artist Lynda Draper, who is one of 36 finalists in the 2025 MAKE Award: Biennial Prize for Innovation in Australian Craft and Design (10 October – 19 November 2025).

The award is also part of Australian Design Centre’s annual Sydney Craft Week Festival, 10 days of exhibitions, markets, talks and hands-on workshops all over Sydney and surrounds. For the popular event’s ninth year in 2025, the theme was Material Intelligence. This also resonated through the MAKE Award, ADC’s major exhibition during the craft and design festival.

MAKE is Australia’s richest non-acquisitive craft and design award, with a first prize of $35,000 and second prize $10,000. It was established in 2023 by ADC CEO and Artistic Director Lisa Cahill, assisted by a generous private supporter donation. Cahill was one of four judges who shortlisted 36 finalists from 197 entries from around Australia, including Draper’s Apparition. According to the Award criteria, works must demonstrate the makers’ particular skill and innovation, and represent a new evolution in their practice.

MAKE Award and Sydney Craft Week both emphase the materiality of creative practice in the craft and design fields, and how local makers use, manipulate and interrogate materials in innovative ways. In the face of artificial intelligence rapidly transforming our world, this dialogue between maker and material celebrates the qualities of hand-built, spun, blown and forged pieces as integral to an understanding of a maker’s practice.

At the combined opening night event for the MAKE Award and Sydney Craft Week on October 10, attended by a large and enthusiastic crowd in ADC’s Darlinghurst gallery space, the prize winners were announced. NSW contemporary jewellery artist Cinnamon Lee took home the $35,000 first prize for her ingenious and beautiful work NOCTUA, melding lighting, jewellery, sculpture and the endangered Bogong moth. Jake Rollins received second prize for his SOFA1 made out of 3477 used golf balls (yes you can sit on it) and Highly Commended was A Poetry of Rings: The Mulga Alphabet, Victorian artist-jeweller Roseanne Bartley’s alphabet of 26 rings made from found Mulga wood.

Eight of the 2025 MAKE Award finalist works are ceramic. Draper’s piece fuses pearlescent white clay and semi-transparent coloured glass into a bubbling, hybrid form, an amalgam of organic, animate and industrial elements. Known for her intricate coil-built ceramic towers and skeletal frameworks, Draper has long pursued a practice rooted in intuition, play and the liminal space between dreams and reality. Her works are held in major collections including the National Gallery of Australia, the International Museum of Ceramics in Faenza, and the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. Apparition signals a striking development for Draper, one that is as much about collaboration with people as working with new materials.

The work emerged during Draper’s six-week residency at Canberra Glassworks in 2024, the largest studio dedicated to glassmaking in Australia. Entering the glass hot shop, she sought to unsettle the familiar rhythms of clay and engage in a dialogue with glass. For an artist used to working alone, the residency’s collaborative environment, supported by the expertise of glassblowers and technicians, expanded not only her community but also her understanding of material processes. Draper described her approach as “arriving with a few ideas, but staying open, letting experimentation guide me.” This openness became essential as she negotiated the materiality of two very different mediums.

Clay has been Draper’s chosen medium for its tactility due to its capacity to record fingermarks and the intimacy of human touch. Glass, by contrast, is fluid, luminous and volatile, constantly shifting in response to heat and light. To create a dialogue between the two materials, attentiveness is required: not imposing form on the material, but responding to its behaviour and recognising its agency.

“What I enjoyed most about working with glass compared to clay was the material difference,” she says. “With clay one shapes form, with glass light. So I thought, I really want to link to the clay so it doesn’t feel like this stiff form. There are all these beautiful qualities that of course could be translated through glass, but the challenge for me was how to get that sense of touch into a material you can’t touch.”

Early experiments with glass moulds and blown glass inspired the artist to imprint plaster pressings with her finger marks into hot glass, creating surfaces that echoed her ceramic language. To support the glass-blown elements, Draper began intuitively constructing a skeletal form out of pinched clay coils, in the style of previous works, but soon realised it needed to be more robust. She began filling the voids with coils, working within the demands of both materials to build an elevated structural form. The result is a work where mass and weightlessness coexist, glass is lifted by clay and clay animated by glass – through this interplay, it seems the sculpture could suddenly levitate.

The emphasis on material enquiry is central to this year’s MAKE Award, where Draper’s work sits alongside other artists similarly expanding the language of ceramics. Dan Elborne’s SLEEPER Side Table #1 uses glaze-welded kiln shelves and props; Zara Collins’ She Always Hated Being Cold mixes porcelain, Egyptian paste and paper to replicate knitted textiles; and Kirsten Coelho’s In A Deep Founded Sheltering explores terracotta and porcelain in slender columnar forms. Each work exemplifies material intelligence in action, and in Draper’s Apparition, the exchange between clay and glass offers a distinctive perspective on how materials can shape artistic form and thought.

A very different demonstration of clay’s transformative qualities is No Friends But The Ghost (Ceng Beng), an exhibition by Sumatran-Australian artist Jayanto Tan showing in ADC’s Object Space window gallery on William Street, also showing until November 19. Tan is known for his colourful depictions of food using clay, and his work is showcased nationally, from his selection in the 66th Blake Prize, his solo show at Verge Gallery, and as winner of the 11th Greenway Art Prize.

Comprising more than 45 hand-built pieces, Tan’s installation at ADC is a banquet of foods from his Sumatran childhood home, and also his adopted home in Australia. Each piece is rendered in earthenware and emboldened with underglaze. Sumatran childhood delicacies and Australian meals mingle harmoniously, creating a cross-cultural table where Tan’s cultural and personal identities meet. These delicious-looking dishes include a conical tower of Nasi Tumpeng (Turmeric Rice) with savoury accompaniments, slabs of fairy bread, fortune cookies, a pandan lamington and colourful moon cakes. The work is completed with a pair of ceramic raku shoes, as well as hanging blue embroidered panelling to create a ritual display celebrating the exchange between his two cultures. The shoes, modelling both Indonesian-style sandals and Australian-style thongs, are a reminder of the ordinary, shared experiences that connect communities. These intricately crafted pieces layered with cultural resonance embody the ability of clay to hold memory and create new forms of belonging.

Tan describes No Friends But The Ghost (Ceng Beng) as a ‘soft still life’, illustrating the transformation from soft clay to a fluid, energetic embodiment of everyday life. First created during a period of isolation during COVID-19, this work recalls a time in Tan’s studio where he felt surrounded by the ‘ghosts’ of family including his mother and father who spoke to him, encouraging him across distance and time to keep making. The work also reflects on the ritual of Ceng Beng, which is a time of remembrance, rest and reflection during mourning.

Growing up in a small North Sumatran village, raised by his Sumatran Christian mother and Guangdong Taoist father, Tan sought to distance himself from his household’s diverse traditions and eventually moved to Sydney, where he studied at the National Art School. It was only later in life, after reflecting on the mourning practices surrounding his father’s death when Tan was five, that he embraced Ceng Beng. This was sparked by a visit to his sister’s house in Indonesia, where they looked at old family photos including the time of their father’s death, and she explained the ritual to him. While others cried around him, his face in the photos was blank, too young to understand. In later years, Tan says,“I denied my authentic culture, I didn’t know it.”

Key to the Ceng Beng ritual is the celebration of family through a gathering of foods, as shown in his installation, presented in partnership with Diversity Arts Australia. In creating food and shoes from clay, the materiality becomes central in this act of cultural (re)connection for Tan. Sensitivity to materiality is also echoed in the embroidered blue panels hanging behind the ceramic pieces, which reference the Deli River in Tan’s hometown and the Cooks River in Inner West Sydney where Tan lives now. The embroidered material embodies the movement, energy and flow of these water systems, as well as the colonial histories that run through both landscapes, Dutch in Indonesia, English in Australia.

“There’s been a lot of trauma and horrible history in these places,” Tan says. “In Australia we all come from migrants except the First Nations people here, and we all want to be seen and accepted. My work is about merging together before eventually talking about the trauma. In this work I’m hoping we can bloom like a garden.”

As Tan notes, while recognising darkness it is important to “always look for the light”. Here, the medium becomes the vessel through which ancestral ties, migration, and multiculturalism are celebrated as part of our personal histories. Through his practice and materials, the artist activates a sense of shared belonging between cultures, creating new spaces for community to gather, connect and reflect.

This sense of community also lies at the heart of Sydney Craft Week, which in 2025 presented more than 240 events spread across Sydney and surrounding regions, from the Illawarra to Newcastle to the Blue Mountains. Ceramics is always well-represented, including Sydney Ceramics Market’s celebration of clay with over 130 ceramic stallholders at Carriageworks; Kil.n.it Experimental Ceramics Studio’s Shelf Life exhibition at Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts reflecting on the importance of books and libraries; the Fire and Fabric exhibition at Shibori Gallery, combining clay and textile works; and Art Kintsugi workshops giving new life to damaged ceramics.

The huge variety of hands-on workshops are vital to the festival’s success each year, giving participants the chance to become makers and create with their own hands. These events all over the city affirm that making is not only about objects, but about relationships between people, places and the materials that shape them.

Editor’s note: Since the writing of this article, Australian Design Centre (ADC) has announced that its board has resolved to cease operations by 30 June 2026, unless alternative funding is secured to cover the shortfall in core operational support. Read more on ADC’s website.

Laura Curcio is an Australian contemporary sculptor, who explores gendered and cultural histories through their use of clay, metal and found objects. Curcio has completed a Bachelor of Arts (2014) and Master of Arts (2016) and is currently studying their Diploma in Ceramics at Northern Beaches TAFE.

The 2025 MAKE Award exhibition and No Friends But The Ghost (Ceng Beng) is on until 19 November 2025 at Australian Design Centre on Gadigal Land, 101–115 William Street, Darlinghurst, NSW, Australia.

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There are journeys that run like rivers, looping back, carving new paths, and gathering stories along the way. For Susannah Israel, Archie Bray has been that river. Each time she returned, the current was different: once as a young resident chasing possibility, again as a writer drawn into the narratives of others, and finally as an artist whose years in clay fill the work with depth, gratitude, and resolve. This three-part reflection traces how a single place can transform us again and again, and why the Bray remains a wellspring of creative magic.

Part I. Visiting Artist, 2024

Over time my practice has moved in the direction of site-specific work, and my concept for the Visiting Artist residency was to reflect on the lasting influence of Archie Bray. The three sections of “We are the body, the boat, and the water” represent my three residency periods at the Bray. I made notes and drawings for several months before the residency, which is how I begin making work. I have learned to keep the process open, allowing for discovery, inspiration and the unexpected. I knew I would find all these and more, returning to the Bray for the third time in three decades, in three different capacities.

I brought different experiences and expectations to each residency, and acceptance was central to the third. After a long life in clay, I have physical limitations that preclude driving, and require wheelchair assistance in the airports. At the Bray, I needed help lifting and kiln-loading; rather than making me feel unable, this gave me wings to carry out an admittedly ambitious project. The encouragement and shared excitement about the developing piece was a substantial part of my experience. Getting to make a second sited sculpture for the Bray sculpture grounds is a wonderful honor, and without the support of a great many people, it would not have happened. That is the magic of Archie Bray.

The title “We are the body, the boat and the water” refers to the human journey, how we become who/what we have lived. The sculpture is made in three sections, each one representing a different residency period at the Bray. The work tells my story in the form of a river that is also the boat that carries and permeates the figures riding it. In the end, it is all one journey. That first residency at the Bray established my love of terracotta, and my palette of primary colors, green, black and white. Water is a consistent metaphor I use to signify change, movement, and the passing of time; the serpentine line is my method of representing water with clay. Using my whole arm to make repeating curves is both a visual and physical process, creating balance and rhythm. These serpentine lines connect the three sections into one sculpture. I built the bases and the figures at the same time, using large coils. To define and emphasize the curving lines of water, I challenged myself by curving the bottom of the bases. I applied color to the leatherhard forms, so both curve and color move up the figures without a visual break. Despite the intensive work schedule, I found time for sharing stories and looking at amazing work by the residents and staff.

Summer Residency, 2002
The first figure has one leg and one arm submerged, riding the waves in a boat made of water. The waves continue up the body to the waist. The other leg is extended straight ahead and the person is looking eagerly toward the future. This is about my summer artist residency at Archie Bray in 2002, a time when I was beginning a teaching career and a new relationship, and feeling excited about what a life in clay would bring.

Writer in residence, 2011
The central figure, submerged to the heart, holds a lit candle and reads from a large book. Here the figure is reviewing the journey, at ease in the water, and ready to share and exchange knowledge. It represents my second time at the Bray as writer in residence. I worked in the visiting artist studio and interviewed the 5 residents completing their 2-year AIR, an intensive exchange that brought context and inspiration to my own art practice.

Visiting Artist, 2024
The third section of this site-specific sculpture is about returning for a final residency as an invited visiting artist. The figure is reflective and tranquil, and both feet and hands are submerged. The waves have risen to cover most of the face. The person is recognizing and celebrating the path to this moment, feeling grateful for all that has been possible, and ready for the next adventure in clay.

Part II. Writer in residence, 2011

I was selected as the 2011 Jentel Critic at Archie Bray, and I hold the unique distinction of having been both writer-in-residence and artist-in-residence (in 2002) at the Bray. I spent the first two weeks of May in Montana, interviewing the Bray Fellows about their artwork and experiencing firsthand the creative environment that shaped the pieces featured in their farewell exhibitions. From May 15 to June 15, I continued the residency at the Jentel Foundation in Wyoming, using the quiet, isolated setting to focus on writing five essays for the exhibition catalog. This is what I noted in my exit interview:

By nature I am a worker bee, dedicated to service in my community. Both these residency programs provided community, beautiful, inspiring surroundings and gave me time to work on anything I wanted. To quote Alan Rickman, it was ‘like pouring gasoline on a fire.’ I am forever grateful to the Bray and Jentel Foundations, and I am, frankly, intoxicated by all this honey.”

Harnessing critical writing to ceramic art is a wonderful challenge. I greatly enjoyed meeting the artists, learning about their methods and ideas, and condensing the copious notes that resulted into 500-word essays. But there was an unexpected part to the residency. As a critic at the Bray, I expected to completely focus on writing catalog essays for the five fellowship artists. I had the pleasure of meeting Resident Director Steve Lee. I got to see the new Shaner Studio. When Steve told me the Voulkos Studio was to be my work space for the next two weeks at the Bray, I listened in gleeful astonishment. Having disciplined myself to the prospect of two weeks without sculpting, I was immeasurably delighted.

I made the piece “Apostrophe” in 12 days, including bisque-firing, to the amusement of sculptor Kensuke Yamada. I had to. Driving alone from California through the changing, spectacular landscapes of the Sierra mountains, through Utah’s great red rocks to the Idaho-Montana pass, the terrain imprinted itself relentlessly upon me. I drew landscapes every night before bed, and they followed me into my dreams. I saw huge figures, overlooking the tiny human travelers with calm and distant regard. The agrarian machinery was a lesson in formal composition, vast beyond human scale. The drawings filled dozens of pages in my notebooks.

As I worked in clay at the Bray, these images compelled my attention. The sections of the sculpture are the six states I journeyed through: California, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming; each is represented in the blocks that form a reclining figure. I had intended to devote myself only to writing. But the sketchbooks would not allow it.

The name “Apostrophe” comes from a term in the theater. In an apostrophe scene, the actor onstage speaks to an absent person. As I worked it became clear that my absent person was Bill Lassell, my beloved creative collaborator who accompanied me during my first residency at Archie Bray, in the summer of 2002. Bill died at home unexpectedly, though peacefully, in 2009. Making that same journey alone, nine years later, his presence was indelibly part of my second residency, infusing the very landscape with memory and reflection.

Part III. Summer residency, 2002

In June of 2002 I drove to Helena, Montana for a summer residency at Archie Bray. It was a critical time in my artmaking, as I was mourning the death of my partner of 25 years, and had not been working. The strength and inspiration of the Bray creative community brought solace and new inspiration, inspiring Tea at Archie Bray, an affectionate narrative about my residency experience.

The Tea Party piece is permanently sited at the Bray, so I intended it to be about community, the work, the long conversations of summer 2002. With this in mind I included elements from my fellow residents. Terry Geiber donated chopped nylon fiber for my clay mix; Susan Beiner made plaster molds of Bill Lassell’s feet, used for all three figures; Mika Negishi contibuted six clay eggs; Allison McGowan, a textured porcelain cup for the central figure; Sean Derry – the cast green apple the left figure is holding, tempting a gopher. I made the third cup, the chickens, figures and animals; Bill helped mix the clay, load and unload the kilns, and he carried everything that was heavy.

Each element of the sculpture is a reference to the summer’s events. A heat wave affected the baby birds, and they fell from their nest by the summer studio. We dropper-fed our little foundlings six to eight times a day. Their constant cheeping became our ambient sound track for the summer. We taught them to fly, by perching them on sticks and making them flap their wings. It worked – or instinct worked, and they were soon flying around the studio. They were bold and friendly, perching on our worktables to see what was happening, and had an excellent relationship with the baby kitten, also in residence.

En route to the Bray, Lesley had witnessed some kittens tossed from a car. She rescued the lone survivor, and named him Oliver. He was companionable with everyone, including the baby birds, and liked meandering aroundthe studio checking our work. When Lesley finished work for the day she would pick him up and drape him around her neck like a black velvet collar.

On July 4th a terrified young dog ran into the summer studio. We gave him water and mashed potatoes, lacking any dog food. A comical aspect of this evening was our discussion about his name. Various names were tried, and we concurred that he responded to Jim. The next day Sandra Trujillo drove Jim around Helena looking for his home. He responded to a particular street, and then a certain house where she let him out, and he trotted up to the door and was let in. I guess they’ll never know.

Because of these collective experiences, the animals of the summer studio all appear in the Tea Party sculpture. The chickens and gopher are the products of my imagination. It is noteworthy that these pieces have sustained no damage from the extremes of Montana weather, which makes them an excellent argument for the durability of clay in public art.

Susannah Israel is a sculptor, writer and educator known for terracotta figures that engage with social, cultural and political themes. Born in New York and now based in Oakland, she has exhibited internationally and her work is represented in major museum collections. Israel has received a US Artist Grant, the Fletcher Challenge Premier Award and a Virginia Groot Foundation Award, among others.

Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts (The Bray) was founded at the foothills of the Montana Rockies in 1951 by entrepreneur, brickmaker, and avid arts patron Archie Bray, who intended it to be a place to “make available for all who are seriously interested in the ceramic arts, a fine place to work.” The primary mission is to provide an environment and connection with other serious artists that stimulates creative work in ceramics.

Located on the site of the former Western Clay Manufacturing Company, the 26-acre historic brickyard campus has more than 17 buildings, including a 12,000-square-foot resident artist studio facility, a new education and research facility, multiple sales and exhibition galleries, renovated administrative offices, and a facility for ceramic retail and manufacturing. The property is open to artists, students, gallery visitors, and ceramic supply customers, as well as the general public for classes, gallery visits, retail activity, self-guided tours, and structured group visits.

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Featured image: Susannah Israel, We are the body the boat and the water, 2024, terracotta, H 50 x L 130 x W 25 inches. Photo by Simphiwe Mbunyuza

At The Clay Studio, care is at the core of working in clay and building community. When we began preparing for our move to our new building in the South Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia in 2018, we invited forty neighbors to join us for Clay & Conversations, funded by a Discovery Grant from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. We met four times, each time creating a project in clay while discussing what each person loved about their neighborhood, their hopes and fears for its future, and how The Clay Studio could help. Our hunch was that working in clay during these deep conversations would create a greater sense of ease and allow for better connection and understanding. Our intuition was proven correct; we heard thoughtful suggestions and formed deep relationships that still exist today. The seed for this exhibition was planted. We conceptualized Clay as Care as a way to explore how ceramic artists use the material to express deep feelings of care and healing, and how those concepts are communicated to the viewer.

The exhibition Clay as Care is predicated on our intuitive sense that concepts of care are inherent in the process of making ceramics. Transforming this earth material into a finished ceramic art object is not easy. It requires many steps, hard physical labor, skill acquired over years, a light touch, a sense of agency, and an understanding of nuance. Is this not congruent with how we care for others, with the work we do as parents, as teachers, as mentors, as friends, as citizens of the world?

Our understanding that working with clay is a care modality is built from our collective experience and that of the thousands of people who have worked at The Clay Studio over the years, together with the artwork and writings of artists like MC Richards, Paulus Behrenson, Adelaide Alsop Robineau, and William Morris (just to name a few). We also recognize that clay has served humanity as a care modality long before our modern times. Since humans discovered from their own ingenuity and imagination how to shape clay into forms, the finished products have served as tools to care for others. Ceramic vessels allowed water and food to be offered to others in the community and enabled food and drink to be stored and preserved over an extended period of time. This provided the possibility for larger groups of humans to stay together and build mutually beneficial relationships, to care for each other, and to allow culture to grow and flourish.

The physical act of manipulating clay—wedging, kneading, wheel throwing, and preparing it for firing—along with preparing and watching the kiln, practicing patience to see if the long process has produced a successful object, are all congruent with actions and ideas involved in caring for ourselves and others. These steps can create a meditative state, as repetitive motions are shown to create psychological release. The clay-working process also demands that the maker slow down and focus on one thing, to practice patience through the many steps in the process, and in modern times it forces us to look away from screens.
Through Clay as Care, we are starting with what we know—the clay—and hoping to move forward with these ideas. We engaged practitioners of art therapy and neuroaesthetics as partners in the project to explore the scientific bases for our intuited connections between clay and care. They are helping us determine the measurable data that will bolster the link between the physical act of working with clay and its effect on our neurology.

Our process to create exhibitions, especially this one, is a microcosm of care. Collaboration is also at the heart of concepts of care and is also key to our exhibition design process. Our big exhibition ideas often start with group discussions, bringing together many voices to talk about what drives us to do this work, which topics feel critical to address, and how these are reflected in the artwork being created in the ceramic art world.

We sensed that care was becoming part of the zeitgeist in 2020. As we moved through the COVID pandemic, we saw the rise of empathy, social activism, anti-racism, and ideas about rest as a tool of resistance, along with a growing focus on how to care for ourselves and others through hard times. We saw it happening in our own studios, in the larger art world, in scientific studies, and in the culture at large. The concept of care became our focus for a future exhibition, which we present in 2025 as Clay as Care.

Clay as Care is a groundbreaking project examining how care manifests in ceramic art through an exhibition, research, publication, and symposium that considers the relationships between clay, care, and rest from artistic, civic, and scientific perspectives. Alongside landmark contemporary artworks in clay that center care and healing, we will examine how viewing ceramic art and working with clay can promote wellness for both the artist and the viewer.

At the core of Clay as Care is the work of Adebunmi Gbadebo, Jennifer Ling Datchuk, Maia Chao, and Ehren Tool, groundbreaking artists who are addressing care, healing, rest, and resilience in their work. These artists acknowledge and access qualities of care for themselves in making their art, and therefore communicate aspects of care to their audiences. Gbadebo harvests clay from the plantation where her family was enslaved, and uses it to create vessels as an act of healing for the memory of her ancestors. Datchuk creates work with images representing her journey with fertility-related medical procedures and builds spaces for contemplation. Tool, a military veteran, has made over 26,000 cups during his artistic life and says that his “process is therapeutic—and the cups are a kind of catharsis in clay.” In addition to the artists, co-curator Nicole Pollard, our Community Exhibition Council, members of the care movement, and scientists researching the connections between art and care have come together to explore how to offer the visitor ways to engage in acts that combine clay and care within the gallery. The planning process brought these individuals together to learn from each other and explore ideas that break down hierarchical structures present in many art viewing environments. The exhibition pushes beyond traditional methods of displaying art to create new systems of engagement for visitors that include viewing, creating, and resting.

The strength of Clay as Care is that it connects the healing value of viewing and making ceramic art directly into the exhibition experience by offering the viewer a place to work with clay and to experience rest. This is a creative priority because The Clay Studio functions on the belief that through promotion of the ceramic arts, we can create positive social change. We continue to stretch in new ways to ensure that our programming is meaningful for the greatest number of people possible by including many voices in the exhibition planning and design process.

The Clay Studio Exhibition Council is composed of neighbors with whom we have worked and built trust since 2018. They act as ambassadors in their networks to help us form strong relationships in our hyperlocal community. Additional members are curatorial peers, and artists. Together, they give feedback and input on all exhibitions, with more active participation in planning major shows like Clay as Care. The Council represents a variety of cultural backgrounds that reflects Philadelphia’s demographics. They are compensated for their time, and are an important part of The Clay Studio community.

Our continually evolving understanding of how best to serve our audience drives the concept of Clay as Care. Audiences deserve to be centered in exhibition design, a concept that is often not honored in mainstream museum exhibitions. With our Council during the planning phase, Clay as Care has made the care and comfort of the visitor central to how the exhibition is shaped and how the gallery space is designed by including a space to physically rest that is comfortable for people of different abilities, as well as a place to experience the benefits of working with clay. Surveying the visitors throughout the exhibition period, we will examine the essential quality of care that can be accessed when making, viewing, and experiencing ceramic art in a gallery setting.

Clay as Care extends our mission to support artists and community by unifying our exhibition and studio programming to celebrate care as an important shared outcome. It has enabled new partnerships with collaborators from the care movement and health research sectors. These include Tricia Hersey, author of Rest Is Resistance; Anjan Chatterjee, Director of the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics; Rachel Brandoff, former Art Therapy Program Coordinator for the master’s program in art therapy and counseling at Jefferson University and Girija Kaimal, Chair of the Drexel Creative Arts Therapies department. The gallery space includes elements we have never before used, including a space for working with clay inside the gallery, and an area where visitors can experience physical rest during their art-viewing gallery time.

By expanding our normal spheres of exhibition collaborators to include health researchers, we increased our capacity to develop new standards for visitor experience. Together with our scientific partners we formulated a visitor survey to determine which gallery elements are most beneficial. Clay as Care will manifest a new nexus of inquiry, a space for gathering people who can help us make a meaningful contribution to this essential contemporary conversation about the role of art and care in personal and collective healing, in order to build a better future through a focus on art and what unites us as humans.

Jennifer Zwilling is The Clay Studio’s Curator and Director of Artistic Programs. She earned her BA in History from Ursinus College and MA in Art History from Temple University, Tyler School of Art. Previously, she was Assistant Curator of American Decorative Arts and Contemporary Craft at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Jennifer developed and taught History of Modern Craft at Tyler School of Art for ten years and has taught and lectured around the world.

Josie Bockelman is The Clay Studio’s Deputy Director, leading daily operations and championing the high-quality programming and staff support that draws artists, students, and collectors to The Clay Studio. Since earning her Bachelor of Arts in ceramics from Whitman College in 1999, Bockelman has been dedicated to non-profit community art education both as a teaching artist and program administrator. She believes strongly in fostering an educational community that is vibrant, inclusive and supportive.

Clay as Care is on view at The Clay Studio, Philadelphia, between October 9 and December 31, 2025.

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Photos by Alexander Mansour

Ceramics Now announces a new Call for Papers

We’re excited to announce a new call for papers for publication in Ceramics Now Magazine in 2026.

Ceramics Now invites submissions of critical essays, exhibition reviews, and research-based articles for upcoming issues of the magazine. In honoring our commitment to showing the evolving trends and concepts that shape contemporary ceramics, we welcome writing that deepens the understanding of clay as a material of artistic, social, and ecological inquiry. We seek contributions that approach ceramics through diverse perspectives — artistic, curatorial, historical, philosophical, political, or environmental.

Submission deadline for proposals/pitches: January 15, 2026.

We are particularly interested in:
• Critical essays and research articles — Exploring ideas such as materiality, sustainability, ecology, identity, temporality, and postcolonial or cultural frameworks in ceramic practice.
• Reviews and features — Covering key exhibitions, biennials, fairs, and collaborative projects that expand the field of ceramics.

Examples of topics we’d like to cover:
• Representation and access in contemporary ceramics — how race, geography, class, and institutional structures shape visibility and opportunity.
• Sustainability and ethics — material sourcing, ecological impact, and evolving sustainable practices within ceramic production and exhibition.
• The ceramic art market — how visibility, institutional validation, and collecting trends shape artistic direction.
• Pedagogy and transmission of knowledge — how ceramics is taught, learned, and passed on across institutions, community studios, and informal settings.
• Interdisciplinary and post-disciplinary practices.

Please note that this call for papers is not intended for artist profile submissions.

Before submitting an article, you are encouraged to contact the editor at vasi@ceramicsnow.org with a brief outline of your proposal. We prioritize articles grounded in original research that have not previously been published elsewhere.

• Articles should range between 1500 and 3000 words.
• Please include high-resolution images with appropriate credits.
• Along with your article, provide a short biography.
• We offer at least $200 for selected articles, made possible through the support of Ceramics Now’s patron subscribers, who contribute to our Writers Fund.
• We can assist with arranging guided tours, securing exhibition tickets, and setting up relevant meetings.

Articles published in Ceramics Now and Ceramics Now Magazine reach a broad international audience passionate about ceramic art. Over 50,000 people read Ceramics Now each month, and the publication reaches around 600,000 monthly views on social media. More than half of our readers are from the US, 25% are from the EU, and 15% are from the UK.

All our content is accessible to everyone and free of charge. Ceramics Now is an independent publication sustained by its members. Their support allows us to commission and publish new writing, ensuring that critical discourse around ceramics remains accessible to all.

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We’re looking forward to receiving your submissions!

Essay on Written in Clay, Ceramics from the John David Lawrence Collection, at the Vancouver Art Gallery. On the Traditional Coast Salish Lands including the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.

The exhibition, Written in Clay, Ceramics from the Collection of John David Lawrence¹, being held at the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG), in Vancouver, British Columbia (BC), is devoted entirely to the studio ceramics of this region. The collector, John David Lawrence was drawn into the world of ceramics over twenty-five years ago while managing his glittering warren of goods and goodies in his store, DODA ANTIQUES, in the downtown core of Vancouver. As BC ceramics started to accumulate in his shop, refugees from craft fairs and estates, Lawrence began to succumb to their allure. He became hooked on identifying the makers, as any good collector would, and familiarized himself with artists’ choices of clay, glaze and form, and, importantly, he always collected any associated stories. Inevitably Lawrence began to amass his own private collection, which gradually migrated from shop to home, and over time he has happily conceded much of his living space to gleaming ranks, rows, and towers of pottery. He is adamant that all works remain on display.

Collectors are the stewards of object -provenance, they metamorphose into creatures of object-love, and become entangled with object-stories. They safeguard those things, which by virtue of being collected, have become aesthetic purveyors of the time and place of their origins. Ultimately, what determines the validity of any collection is the collector’s ability to sense and recognize the merit of what is within their reach. In the John David Lawrence Collection, of several thousand ceramic works, every piece has its own place, and every piece has its own story, and the stories matter. In British Columbia, studio ceramics did not organically evolve from existing traditions, but rather, from the 1920s were rapidly introduced through the agencies of both immigration and imported knowledge. The repercussion of the ceramic practice not being rooted in this place is that our cultural institutions have been slow to become engaged and informed, and with few significant regional ceramics held in public institutions, works are still being preserved in private collections, and the anecdotal knowledge is being stashed in personal recollections. To paraphrase Lawrence in his conversation with Michael Prokopow, in the publication, The Place of Objects…² He said that the legacy of his collection includes himself, meaning his memory.

Sometimes Lawrence is in contact with the makers, at other times he is chasing BC legends, like Ebring, Kakinuma, Davis, Ross, Hughye, Ngan, or Reeve. The act of collection has turned Lawrence into a recognized BC ceramic expert, and he frequently loans ceramics to public galleries across Canada. One such exhibition was for the VAG’s 2020 Modern in the Making, Post-War Craft and Design of British Columbia³, for which he loaned 40 works. During the selections the VAG gallerists became familiar with his collection, and this led to Written in Clay. For the purposes of this exhibition Lawrence, and curator, Diana Freundi chose 186 works, made by forty different BC artists. His vast collection is tipped heavily to the 20th Century, however, the works displayed do range from 1924 – 2014. Lawrence has a great respect for functional pottery and is very sensitive to reduction-fired glaze. To reflect his preferences of pot and glaze, the bulk of the exhibition is made up of gas or wood fired functional ware, with only a small percentage of figural or purely expressive works.

The curation for Written in Clay borrows from a 1972 show of John Reeve’s ceramics, one of four solo exhibitions of BC ceramics held at the VAG during the 1970s. Reeve’s pottery was displayed on wooden planking, supported on cement breezeblocks, intended to suggest potters’ ware boards. This style of installation has been echoed in Written in Clay. It is also reminiscent of the ubiquitous breezeblock/pine board shelving, acting as display units at the craft fairs in the 1960s/70s, the fastest, cheapest (and heaviest) method to make a display. In this exhibition there are three ‘islands’ located in the centre of the gallery, each with tiered platforms, again supported by the breezeblocks. The deliberate placement of the ‘island’ pots successfully amplifies the diversity of regional practices. The intervals between disparate neighbours, using distance and visual contrast spark dynamic interplays, while still allowing enough air around each piece to also see it as a distinct entity. This enables the viewer to see that every work is characterized by diverse choices of form, colour, embellishment and intention, as well as by various clay, glaze, and firing technologies. The only information supplied for the island ceramics are titles, dates and artist names, with the overarching message being how distinct and variable every ceramic practice is.

Around the periphery of the gallery are eight spotlight displays featuring the artists that Lawrence was able to collect in depth. These displays have been managed differently, using profiles of the work to show off form and glaze, with a short precis on each artist. The earliest studio potter in BC, Axel Ebring, had been trained in Sweden by his father and grandfather. He arrived BC in the late 1900s, and by the mid 1920s established his first pottery in the interior of BC. It is hard to convey to those outside of British Columbia, the type of terrain, the isolation, and the challenges this location would have presented in that era. There were no commercial or traditional ceramic resources whatsoever, and a drive to Vancouver, the closest sizable city, 450 kilometers away, in a cart or car, would have taken many hours, even days, hampered by broken wheels or flat tires, in unpredictable weathers, and on questionable unpaved, and scary mountain roads. Ebring had to find and manufacture all of his own materials and tools, so he located his workshop near clay and mineral deposits. Another notable aspect of his practice is that he was well established long before the pervasive Leach/Mingei and Modernist influences, especially those from post WWII to the 1970s, had infiltrated much of the studio pottery of the Western world. Consequently, his handsome, vintage forms and lustrous glazes, many of which are lead based, do stand out. In contrast, the pottery of two other spotlight artists, Ontario born, John Reeve, and British Columbian, Charmian Johnson, both Leach apprentices and acolytes, are all about interpretations of Leach/Mingei. The pottery of Wayne Ngan, who arrived in Canada at age 13, elegantly moves through an intersection of influences – Asian, Leach /Mingei, and Modernism. Laura Wee Láy Láq, one of BC’s earliest Indigenous ceramic artists, of Stó:lo (Coast Salish) and Wuikinuxv (Oweekeno) ancestry, focussed on organic form, using coiling, burnishing and pit firing to beautiful and meaningful effect. Albertan, Walter Dexter, who trained in the prairies with Luke Lindoe, and then in Sweden, and Vancouverite, Kathleen Hamilton, both demonstrate the influences of modernist rigour and Scandinavian design. Thomas Takamitsu Kakinuma is represented by his much -loved animal figures. Kakinuma arrived from Japan, in 1937, but it was in the 1950s he acquired his ceramic skills, in both Ontario and at the Ceramic Huts at the University of British Columbia.

Of these spotlight artists, Johnson, Hamilton, and Wee Láy Láq, are the only artists born in BC. Other than Ebring’s work, which is founded on a village tradition, all of the other spotlight artists reveal 20th Century influences that have been delivered to BC. Of the 32 island artists represented, 11 were born in BC, and breaking that down further, almost all of the more senior artists in the exhibition were born elsewhere in Canada, or worldwide. This is the aforementioned characteristic of BC ceramics – its evolution having transpired through external influences, rather than a natural progression led by regional tradition. The dynamic growth of BC’s ceramic arts reflects the extraordinary transformations of the 20th Century around culture and technology, accelerated by the increasing speed of communications. When Belgian potter, Robert Weghsteen, immigrated to Canada in the mid 1950s, he chose to ship his entire studio, equipment and materials, by freighter to Vancouver, rather than deal with potential deficiencies in BC. In a 1989 essay about BC studio ceramics, curator, Glenn Alison and artist, James Thornsbury professed that they could not find evidence of distinct or prevalent BC ceramic traditions. Instead, they came to the conclusion that the strongest work was …”that of isolated, idiosyncratic, individualistic, personal, independent production…that resists classification, or critical scrutiny in any combinative process.” These maverick attributes persist, even though information and influences are disseminated worldwide, the regional perception of being physically isolated and individualistic remains, and is evident in the diversity of the ceramic practices as seen in the exhibition.

One impact of Lawrence’s ceramic collection is that it became a primary source for the nascent BC Ceramics Marks Registry, an online record of BC ceramic marks and artist profiles being developed by the author, with the support of the Craft Council of BC. With Lawrence’s help, and that of Canadian craft historian, Allan Collier, the provenance around the first centenary of studio ceramics in BC has been protected. It is our great hope that by creating this provenance institutional interest will follow and lead to a material arts establishment. At this time the non-Indigenous material arts are without any formal agency protecting their collections and archives. The Indigenous arts, the foundational arts in BC, are splendidly housed in the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology. For decades the two genres have travelled in parallel trajectories, until, at long last, they were brought together in two seminal exhibitions, the 2020/21 Modern in the Making Post-War Craft and Design of British Columbia exhibition, and the Craft Council of BC’s 2020 Personal and Material Geographies⁴. It is hoped that this long overdue rendezvous may awaken more advocacy. Most countries, and many Canadian provinces, do have specialized galleries for their material arts and cultures. In BC our history rests tentatively on private collectors, like Lawrence. For all of these reasons the documentation and curation around the Written in Clay exhibition, has been exceedingly relevant for the material arts culture in BC. Accompanying the exhibition is the beautifully illustrated publication, The Place of Objects, the John David Lawrence Collection. Editors, Stephanie Rebick and Michael Prokopow, collected 36 essays from artists, collectors, and curators, reflecting on the social and cultural impacts of collection, as well as delving into portrayals of Lawrence’s other extraordinary assemblages.

Written in Clay, Ceramics from the John David Lawrence Collection is a breakthrough exhibition, marking the first ceramic exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 36 years, since the 1979 showing of the celebrated BC potter, Wayne Ngan. Lawrence’s own maverick imersion into the cultural ecosystem of his neighbourhood, and his city, contributes enormously to a greater appreciation of what the material arts tell us about ourselves and our history. His dedication to learning about the ceramics of British Columbia has infected others and through the acts of collection, and of knowledge-gathering, Lawrence has initiated what we hope will be an amendment in the status and situation of the ceramic and material arts of British Columbia.

Debra Sloan is an artist living in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Written in Clay, Ceramics from the Collection of John David Lawrence is on view between May 25, 2025 and January 4, 2026, at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver.

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Captions

• Figure 1 (featured image). John David Lawrence in his home, Photo: Vancouver Art Gallery
• Figure 2. Installation views of Written in Clay: From the John David Lawrence Collection, exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Photo: Courtesy of Vancouver Art Gallery
• Figure 3. Installation views of Written in Clay: From the John David Lawrence Collection, exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Photo: Courtesy of Vancouver Art Gallery.
• Figure 4. Installation views of Written in Clay: From the John David Lawrence Collection, exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Photo: Courtesy of Vancouver Art Gallery
• Figure 5. Axel Ebring, Pitcher, c. 1930s, ceramic, Collection of John David Lawrence, Photo: Courtesy of Vancouver Art Gallery
• Figure 6. Axel Ebring, Flowerpot, c. 1940s, ceramic, Collection of John David Lawrence, Photo: Courtesy of Vancouver Art Gallery
• Figure 7. Laura Wee Láy Láq, Olla, 1992, ceramic, Collection of John David Lawrence, Photo: Courtesy of Vancouver Art Gallery
• Figure 8. Wayne Ngan, Tea Bowls, c. 1970s, ceramic, Collection of John David Lawrence, Photo: Courtesy of Vancouver Art Gallery
• Figure 9. Charmian Johnson, Bowl, c. 1970s, ceramic, Collection of John David Lawrence, Photo: Courtesy of Vancouver Art Gallery
• Figure 10. Installation views of Written in Clay: From the John David Lawrence Collection exhibition, Laura Wee Láy Láq spotlight display. Courtesy of Vancouver Art Gallery
• Figure 11. Installation views of Written in Clay: From the John David Lawrence Collection, exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Photo: Courtesy of Vancouver Art Gallery. Debra Sloan, Baby 2014 & Tiny figures,1977, photo: Author
• Figure 12. A sample of roads and travel in BC in the 1920s, Photo courtesy of BC Archival photographs.

From September 17 to November 1, 2025, Monique Deul presents a total of 17 ceramic works by the German artist Johannes Nagel in the new premises of her gallery, Taste Contemporary, in Geneva. With this exhibition, she once again foregrounds contemporary ceramics, which play a central role in the gallery’s programme.

I came to know Johannes Nagel through my work as director of Galerie Handwerk in Munich (2003–2023). His ceramics were shown in several exhibitions at the venue from 2012 onward, and his works have been regularly featured for years at the Internationale Handwerksmesse (International Crafts Fair) in Munich, culminating in his receiving the Bavarian State Prize for Design in 2023. In May 2025, he was featured in “Spotlights of German Ceramics,” an exhibition I co-curated at Ceramic Art Andenne in Belgium. I write this text informed by those personal impressions and conversations with him.

Born in Jena in 1979, Johannes Nagel now lives and works in Halle (Saale). He received his initial training in Quebec, Canada, with the Japanese potter Kinya Ishikawa. Back in Germany, he both studied and taught Fine Art/Ceramics at Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle, a renowned institution for its long-standing ceramic tradition. For a time he was assistant to Prof. Martin Neubert, who also exhibited at Taste Contemporary this year. Since 2008, Nagel has worked as an independent ceramic artist, exhibiting regularly in international solo and group shows. His works are represented in public collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), London; Keramikmuseum Westerwald, Höhr-Grenzhausen; the GRASSI Museum, Leipzig; and Die Neue Sammlung – The Design Museum, Munich.

Glenn Adamson has observed that Nagel’s ceramics embody a “sacrosanct trinity”: the non-perfection of ceramics associated with the traditional Japanese tea ceremony, the clarity and geometry of Bauhaus rationalism, and the individualism of Abstract Expressionism. Nagel does not strive to create static, flawless objects. Instead, he maintains a continual dialogue with material and process—one that keeps evolving and often surprises. In this sense, his ceramics from the years after roughly 2010 brought forth something entirely new and have achieved international renown. His formal language is unmistakable; painting and colour play a major role. His ceramics bear distinctive, instantly recognisable traits: they can be angular and sharp-edged, softly flowing, lively, expansive; bulbous with large funnel necks; assembled into still lifes; and sometimes mounted on lead plinths.

The Geneva exhibition presents four main bodies of work:
• Cuts
• Movements
• Silhouette
• Silhouette Extended (which lends the exhibition its title)

All the works are made from porcelain body using a casting process developed by Nagel. Formally, the aforementioned “sacrosanct trinity”—non-perfection in ceramics, Bauhaus clarity and geometry, and Abstract Expressionist individuality—is reflected in the pieces on view.

Cuts

Irregular cubes, triangular planes, sharp edges and mostly square, funnel-shaped necks characterise the Cuts. Here are the plaster moulds—cut, sawn, or otherwise worked—that generate the cast forms. Their silhouettes are often accentuated by coloured lines—cobalt blue, for example—that visually tie them together. On certain triangular facets, lines converge toward a central vanishing point, heightening spatiality and multidimensionality and imparting strong dynamism. Glaze and colour play a significant role: when glazed in a single tone—celadon or pure white, for instance—the forms and their constructions read with great clarity. Triangular planes with a crystalline quality are often finished in solid fields of colour. In the Cuts, the vessel character—still associated with many of his works—comes strongly to the fore. In the Geneva exhibition, the Cuts also take on the air of abstract architectures.

Movements

“Movements” is what Johannes Nagel calls the works born from a sandbox. This much-discussed technique of recent years proved a major surprise and a source of renewal. He digs cavities into a box filled with a special dense sand using his hands and arms. These voids are filled with liquid porcelain slip; after a set time, the excess, still liquid, is drained through a hole at the bottom of the box. What remains is a form defined by the tunnel system he excavated. Working virtually blind—guided only by an inner sense of how the form might emerge—he digs into the soft sand. Many experiments and long practice were surely required to wrest from this technique the forms that have, for years now, appeared in great variety and variation.

If one speaks of play in art, these works are, to me, a prime example. When I first learned of this technique, I was reminded of an underwater archaeologist’s account. He dived in Bavarian lakes in search of historical ceramics. The water was often turbid and muddy, making sight impossible; he had to feel blindly for vessels, hands and arms sunk up to the shoulder in the silt. After years of searching, his experience would tell him—often at the first touch—what kind of vessel he had found.

Nagel’s Movements often suggest sweeping, arrested motions. They remind me of dancers beginning to move. Bulbous volumes evoke splendid historical garments, and the flaring, funnel-shaped necks so typical of Nagel’s work suggest hats. For me, they yield impressions of flowing and rotating movement, as well as memories of abstract figurines.

Silhouette

In the Silhouette works, superimposition is the central theme: a precisely shaped, flat silhouette framing a vase-like body formed in sand becomes the ground for dynamic painterly fields. With Silhouette, Nagel titles works that, to my mind, possess a strong vessel character; the theme of the vase is unmistakable. Classical ceramic forms are cited and transformed. Foot, belly, neck and upper opening all carry the hallmarks of the vessel, which, however, shifts into an object. The outer contour plays a major role: the classical canon of the vessel is taken up, translated into Nagel’s formal world and often calmed by monochrome glazes.

The Silhouette works also unite multiple modes of viewing. Two- and three-dimensionality merge in a single form. The vessel is opened up to painting, which, as in the Cuts, articulates the contour lines. Multiple viewpoints can emerge. The painterly element is significant here, underscoring a two-dimensional aspect akin to an image on canvas.

Silhouette Extended

Silhouette Extended is the group that gives the exhibition at Taste Contemporary its title. In these works, the roughly symmetrical form pushes outward into space. We see bulges, elongations, extensions. This allows insights that were previously possible, but now in a new way. Cropped or fractured, expansive hollow vessel parts sometimes appear as if they have been encrusted for decades, fused with the body of the vessel. The glazed interior views carry an air of secrecy. In the Extended works, volume and three-dimensionality once again claim space.

To keep my remarks on the works at Taste Contemporary from straying too far, I would like to let Johannes Nagel speak for himself, with an excerpt from what he wrote for the exhibition:

“When I began working with casting to create sculpture and ceramic ware, I was fascinated by the inversion of a three-dimensional object and by the possibility of reproducing any form I could make or find. But the process lacked something of the immediacy and spontaneity I had experienced when working directly with clay. That immediacy is one of clay’s seductive qualities, as it records the maker’s intentions and attitudes. It was a great liberation to break out of the traditional discipline of mould-making and to discover more immediate ways of casting. The first impulse came when I took a saw to a previously unsuccessful mould, skipped the prototype and cut directly into the plaster. The mould became an active partner in constructing and deconstructing the vessel. Through this process, the idea of a vase as sculptural expression took shape in my mind and in my work. Another key discovery emerged from a series of experiments that led to a very direct manual method: organic forms carved by hand into a box of dense sand and cast in porcelain. I wanted these casting methods to remain an expressive component of the finished piece.

Recently, I came across the work of Lambros Malafouris, a Greek-British cognitive archaeologist, who considers artists or craftspeople and their materials as ‘partners’ that take turns leading the ‘dance’ of making. Malafouris writes that throwing on the wheel is an example of material engagement in which human and material agency are inextricably intertwined. He argues that ‘agency and intentionality are not properties of things, but neither are they properties of humans: they are properties of material engagement—the grey zone where brain, body and culture merge.’ This collaboration is at the heart of what I seek. It does not involve chance, but rather a dance with matter. This dance—or struggle—is clearly visible in the works presented here: tunnels that encircle a void; cuts and sharp edges that trace the flow of a contour; patterns and colours that contradict their body or reflect subtle dynamics. Some movements slip out of their well-composed silhouette. I am not after the perfect finish or ultimate expression, but a language of immediacy and the potential of objects.” —Johannes Nagel, June 2025

The exhibition at Taste Contemporary offers a noteworthy, tension-filled and varied selection of recent works by Johannes Nagel. It brings us close to the ceramics of this German artist at a high level and convinces through its quality. Anyone interested in following this ceramist’s path should not miss the opportunity to visit the exhibition. It runs in Geneva through November 1, 2025.

Wolfgang Lösche studied European Cultural Studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. From 2003 to 2023, he served as Director of Galerie Handwerk in Munich, focusing on craft and applied art. He now lives and works in Dießen am Ammersee as an independent curator and juror.

Johannes Nagel: Silhouette Extended is on view at Taste Contemporary, Geneva, between September 17 and November 1, 2025.

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Photos by Ruth Ward. Courtesy of Taste Contemporary

“Crashing Ceramics,” a multi-media, installation-based group exhibition curated by Mr. Feng Boyi, Ms. Li Yifei, and Mr. Gao Wenjian, featured 30 avant-garde artists at the Taoxichuan Longquan Wangou Museum in China. Longquan is the site of extraordinary celadons dating back to the Song Dynasty, a thousand years ago.

Exhibiting artists are based in China unless otherwise noted: Chen Xiaodan, Clarissa Falco of Italy, Elysia Athanatos of Cyprus, Feng Feng, Gan Haoyu, Geng Xue, Hong Hao, Juju Wang, Li Binyuan, Jaffa Lam, Liu Jianhua, Liu Xi, Lu Bin, Marc Leuthold of USA and CH, Ryan Mitchell of USA, Patty Wouters of Belgium, Richard Garrett Masterson of USA, Song Zhifeng, Sun Yue, Susan Kooi of Holland, Tobias Kvendseth of Norway, Wongil Jeon of Korea, Xiao Li, Xie Wendi, Yang Xinguang, Walter Yu, Kerry Yang, Stella Zhang of USA, Zhou Hehe, Zhou Jie.

The lead curator of “Crashing Ceramics,” Mr. Feng Boyi, is a conceptual curator who is interested in material-based artists. In the West, such artists are often referred to as “craft” artists—a term usually dismissed in the broader art world. Mr. Feng does not embrace media-based prejudice, and as a close friend and collaborator of artist Ai Weiwei, recognizes that art knows no boundaries. Mr. Feng’s early career included groundbreaking essays about Chinese contemporary art interwoven with Ai Weiwei’s political philosophy. In Shanghai in 2000, he curated the exhibition titled “Fuck Off,” which was known in China as “Uncooperative Attitude”. The exhibition was closed almost immediately by the government. Currently, Mr. Feng directs the He-Xiangning Museum in Shenzhen, and next year will oversee some of the projects that the International Academy of Ceramics will host at its meeting in Jingdezhen.

In Feng Boyi’s “Crashing Ceramics” curatorial statement, he invokes the term Pengci, invented by late Qing Dynasty (ca. 1900) Beijing residents who would clutch a delicate porcelain vessel while jaywalking in such a careless fashion that drivers would accidentally collide with and destroy the porcelain, thus requiring a financial settlement. Mr. Feng believes that Pengci is a useful metaphor for the “Crashing Ceramics” artists who are routinely “breaking through the restrictions and limitations imposed by traditional ceramics.” Mr. Feng, using the concept of Pengci, ably tables the endless “art vs. craft” debate.

This complex exhibition project resulted in mostly solo installations by thirty artists. As such, the exhibit occupied the entire two-story Museum. Such an enormous undertaking would not have been possible without the assistance of Mr. Feng’s curators, Li Yifei, Gao Wenjian, and other staff.

As a finishing touch, Mr. Feng invited one of his frequent curatorial collaborators, Bjorn Follevaag of Norway, as a keynote guest during elaborate opening ceremonies.

Almost all of the artists incorporated Longquan celadon ceramics within their installations or sculptures. This in itself is revolutionary. It is hard to imagine an exhibition of avant-garde art that incorporates the renowned Chinese Longquan ceramics tradition, famous for its rich blue and green celadons. About a 1000 years ago, Longquan was a top producer of prized ceramics, the best of which were created for the Imperial Court. The ancient forms were clean and precise with the distinctive blue glazes. There was little surface decoration and the purity of form was almost modern in feeling. These works were mostly functional and finely potted. Subsequent dynasties saw a decline in refinement with bulkier forms. The decline continued until the rise of Chairman Mao after 1949, whose government supported and funded a revival of Longquan ceramics. These mid-twentieth-century Chinese artists sought to recreate past glories and surpass them within a traditional artistic vocabulary. In recent years, universities have established outposts in Longquan – elaborate, lavish studios and galleries with gardens and production facilities. Recently, Taoxichuan established a large facility by renovating an old factory complex and constructing key new facilities. Taoxichuan is a corporation that leverages government support and attracts investors, inviting Chinese and international artists to create art using local clays and glazes in Jingdezhen and Longquan.

The exhibition featured two groups of creatives. There were artists who had not worked with ceramics, and these artists came to Longquan beginning in late 2024 to create artwork at Taoxichuan Longquan. A second group of artists has worked with ceramics for decades. Many of these are contemporary (not traditional), celebrated Chinese artists.

For the exhibit, artists were invited to experiment, surpass previous works in scope and scale, and, at times, to collide with one another and with their own creations in order to innovate in a traditional medium. Innovation has been a key driver of China’s modern development and remains a focus of Chinese society. This is more obvious in manufacturing and technology (electric cars), but Chinese leaders believe that innovation is not a gated community restricted to the business world. Innovation is a wholistic goal encompassing all of society including the arts. Projects like “Crashing Ceramics” receive support from both government and private sources. The United States also once embraced this approach. For example, during the 1950s Cold War, the United States quietly supported Abstract Expressionist painting as a uniquely American cultural signature. During the Cold War competition with the Soviet and Maoist systems, the American government funded artists like Jackson Pollock by funneling Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) funds via the (William S.) Paley Foundation and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. These American organizations and their patrons commissioned, purchased, and exhibited bold, daring large paintings. All of this is to demonstrate the supposed superiority of the American free-enterprise system. How else could impoverished artists like the Abstract Expressionists have created paintings that sometimes were 6 meters high and 10 meters wide? While those days in the United States are long gone, China recognizes the power of culture within their nationwide rejuvenation project. As a result, it has embraced iconoclastic curators like Mr. Feng. While Ai Weiwei was, of course, not included in this exhibit (remember, many of his works, such as the Tate Museum’s sunflower seed installation and his Coca-Cola vessels, were ceramic-based), other masters were.

Near the Museum entrance, the widely admired artist, Mr. Feng Feng, had installed a piece consisting of many ceramic brains mounted on the wall. The ensemble of dozens of brains was shaped like a heart, measuring 4 meters in height and width. At the center was a golden head and a golden brain. Mr. Feng Feng celebrates emotional/empathic intelligence – a reminder of the importance of love, something easily forgotten in a material and technologically driven society. Next to Mr. Feng’s artwork, another world-famous Chinese artist, Li Binyuan, presented “Rumor,” a ceramic tongue pierced by an arrow that succinctly addresses censorship, both by government and society. In China, censorship is only formal, imposed by the government. In contrast, in the West, we are free to speak our minds, but we usually don’t because many topics and words are considered taboo. In the digital realm, words have become an even more lethal weapon. Nearby, Mr. Liu Jianhua exhibited brightly pigmented, quickly created, porcelain globs, titled “Color”. The unselfconscious simplicity of these forms is meant to correspond to a spiritual purity. Mr. Liu exhibited art at the Venice Biennale in 2017, and his work has been collected by Tate Modern, MoMA, and the Guggenheim Museum. Rounding out these Chinese superstar artists was Mr. Hong Hao. In his work, Mr. Hong has incorporated Song dynasty Longquan shards, relics of imperial-grade vessels within abstract paintings – a series titled, “Realm of Objects”. Rich impasto paint in light muted colors, surround and embrace the shards. One of these paintings is a mandala, and another is like a Japanese Zen garden. Instead of gravel, rich furrowed impasto brushstrokes surround and draw attention to the precious ancient ceramics. The functional ceramic shards (broken high-quality wares) have thus been transformed into paintings – the apogee of the visual arts as established long ago by the French Royal Academy. In this way, Mr. Hong has elegantly subverted the Western prejudice against ceramics and crafts – long considered a lowly medium, not to be exhibited with paintings at the Academy.

Further into the Museum galleries, Ms. Liu Xi presented a masterful installation of black and gold castings, suggesting remnants of the David. The David here is deconstructed and blackened, yet also gilded with gold luster. Near Ms. Liu’s work, Stella Zhang, a Chinese-born artist residing in California, created a poetic installation of organic forms that embodies an Asian aesthetic sensibility within Western concepts of contemporary art. Another famous Chinese conceptual artist is Xiaodan, an artist who recognizes no limits in her practice. For years, she has created and exhibited huge and small ceramic bones and gestural forms encrusted with flowers. Ms. Xiaodan has created installations and videos with a haunting quality in which she explores elemental themes of death and resurrection. In this exhibition, her installation “Build and Destroy” consists of two large racks filled with brick-shaped vessels containing bones. Xiaodan creates visual interest through intense repetition, scale, and the evidence of fire and burning, referencing cremation, the afterlife, and enlightenment. Her work is abstract enough not to be didactic or limited to one interpretation – a temptation that is usually best resisted.

Yet another famous artist, Ms. Geng Xue, has spent her entire adult life at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing—the Chinese equivalent of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in Germany. I met her as she was graduating from CAFA. As a graduating student over 15 years ago, she displayed a menagerie of hundreds of ceramic figures engaged in daily Chinese activities. This narrative diorama was abstracted in such a manner as to resemble a Chinese painting in three dimensions. Ceramics in the Sculpture Department at CAFA has long played an important role, thanks to the leadership of former Dean Lv Pinchang, now the President of Jingdezhen University, which is the largest and oldest ceramic university in China. It is rumored that a Swiss collector purchased Ms. Geng’s entire menagerie of figures for more than 1,000,000 RMB, and that Geng wisely bought an apartment and studio in Beijing, thus securing her future. Now, she teaches at CAFA and has branched out to create videos. Geng’s videos often touch on the notion of ceramics as a primordial medium. Her video at Longquan has a mythological undertone, with a narrative featuring a protagonist who serves as the divine creator, bringing life to the inanimate clay.

In their curatorial statement, Mr. Feng and his curatorial team mention that, in addition to famed mature Chinese artists, they also prioritized young artists. One of the most promising is Ms. Sun Yum, a former student of Tsinghua University Professor Baiming. Sun presented an installation of unfired, life-like flowers made in the style of artists from Dehua, a town renowned for its translucent, jade-like clay. Hovering above the ceramics in a terrarium-like tube were lacy ferns whose water drippings would erode the clay in the course of a six-month-long exhibition. Having left China, I was unable to witness this evolution, but her work set up a narrative that lives in our minds as we imagine the erosion and disintegration of her fine work. Another young artist, Ms. Juju Wang, presented a wall montage, “Ethereal Symphony: Between Realms,” of glittering metallic shapes, each with a small celadon ceramic appliqué. These forms project from the wall on thin wires. A nearby fan caused the glittering shapes to flutter and dance—a lively, dynamic installation. Interestingly, this artist, a Chinese-American, was wooed back to China and has been officially recognized as one of the top 100 cultural creatives in China by a government that strives to lure Chinese ethnic groups back home. Another emerging artist, Mr. Yang Xinguang, created a series of abstract forms richly glazed with Longquan light blue celadon. All these forms were punctuated by wooden branches that were carved and inserted into the clay forms. Poetically arranged and wholly abstract, the forms were like a calligraphic Haiku presented on a large, low horizontal plinth. Another emerging artist, Ms. Zhou Hehe, presented a teepee of large burnt wooden beams pierced by dozens of ceramic spikes in a darkened room. This powerful sculpture, whose linear elements all pointed skyward, was a strong contrast to the nearby child-like, deskilled landscapes, vessels, and creatures presented by Dutch artist Susan Kooi. Another young Chinese artist, Ms. Jaffa Lam, worked with clay to capture the texture of the fine old trees that surround the buildings of the Taoqiquan Longquan campus. She did so by moulding clay on the bark while having a photographer capture the process. In the exhibition, she showcased her ceramics and photographs documenting her creation process.

Artists from all over the world were represented in the exhibition, and refreshingly, there were new faces included. In early Spring, Mr. Feng, Ms. Yi, and Mr. Gao visited the Taoxichuan Longquan Wangou creation village to meet with artists who had been invited to create artwork for the Crashing Ceramics exhibition. Not all of the artists working at Longquan Wanghou had been invited to exhibit. But Mr. Feng and his team agreed to visit ALL the artists’ studios and chose to include all the artists. In this manner, Patty Wouters, Elysia Athanatos, and Clarissa Falco joined the exhibition. This was especially felicitous in the case of Ms. Athanatos. Athanatos created enormous thrown porcelain forms that did not survive the creation process intact. As such, she hung about 50 shards in the air that appear to be crashing towards the cement floor of the gallery. In the dozens of Chinese articles about the exhibit, this was often included as a signature sculpture of the exhibition. It seemed to epitomize the Pengci anecdote that underpins the curators’ exhibition concept. Athanatos proved to be a master of poetic adaptation in the face of calamity.

As one climbs the stairs to the second floor of the exhibition, the arresting work of Richard Garrett Masterson of California is immediately visible. The sculptures consisted of two press-molded conjoined forms. What is startling about this work is the mutual tension the artist created by the proximity of a second form that appears to just barely balance on a larger monolith. The forms are often bright ochres or terracotta, or dark gray. The artist eschewed the ubiquitous Longquan palette of blue glazes. Nearby, Walter Yu created a miniature village of small traditional Chinese buildings with light and sound. Patty Wouters created a circle of wafer-thin, translucent, lily-pad-like leaves balancing on 30 cm tall stems. Next to Wouters’ installation, artist Mr. Song Zhifeng, who studied art in Germany, displayed his work on the gallery floor. After creating a fascinating, thick, extruded architectonic form that was fired too quickly, the artist pivoted abruptly and presented thin, blue, irregularly shaped pieces of glazed tiles laid on the floor, which referenced a window. Chinese, Japan-based artist Ms. Xiao Li, like Ms. Sun, created a time-based, evolving work. In a small enclosed space whose walls were covered with Longquan blue tiles, Li built a large coiled pot. Hovering above the unfired clay, a clear pouring vessel drips water on the clay – presumably creating a ruin for later viewers.

In a similar vein, Mr. Lubin, a professor at Nanjing University and a curator in next year’s IAC activities in Jingdezhen, presented a phalanx of traditional Longquan forms that were designed to begin to self-destruct after a couple of days. The resulting wreckage evoked the ever-present Longquan shards encountered in the shops, museums, and on the ground – the legacy of a thousand years of ceramic creation and failure. Nearby, Mr. Gan Haoyu exhibited a machine that jerks, jolts, and sputters while creating ceramic forms much like a mud dauber creates its home on a wall. Using brilliant orange clay, the elaborate, noisy Tingley-like machine, garnished with primitively potted vessels, made an eerie noise heard throughout the galleries. Artist, Mr. Wongil Jeon from Korea, is a painter who has never worked with ceramics before. After making a series of beautiful egg-like spherical forms of varying sizes, he found that many of the larger ones failed in the kiln. In response, he painstakingly made similar forms out of cut paper. Accompanying the linear display of these spheroid forms was a video in which he used his body language to outline similar forms by arcing his arms high over his head and around his body, possibly referencing Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Nearby, Ryan Michell, an American who has lived in Jingdezhen for decades, exhibited large, roughly formed, asymmetrical vessels that recall the mountainous landscape often depicted in classical Chinese paintings. His pastel palette of non-Longquan glazes is highly varied, quietly echoing and enhancing the forms. The satiny matte surface was a felicitous choice.

One of the most significant artists in the exhibition was Tobias Kvendseth of Norway, a protege of the exhibition’s guest of honor, Bjørn Follevaag. Mr. Kvendseth, still in his late twenties, used his time in Longquan to create a series of reductivist forms that allude to tools and weapons. These black and white forms were presented on four light tables. The dramatic, literally electric, presentation was possibly inspired by ideation surrounding violence in his culture towards those who embrace alternative lifestyles.

Perhaps the most unusual presentation was created by Clarissa Falco of Italy. Ms. Falco, during her time in the Taoxichuan Longquan Wangou art village, created a series of masks, claws, and jangling anklets from clay. On the opening day of the exhibition, she wore these ceramic forms and offered a performance directly after the opening speeches. As she moved about in yogic fashion, the sounds of her percussive ceramics punctuated her movements. Dousing herself with an urn full of water, followed by another containing sand, she became an encrusted, motile sculpture herself, finally offering some of her ceramic ornaments to the fascinated viewers.

Article author, Marc Leuthold, also created an installation for the exhibition. During his time making art in Longquan, Leuthold invited everyone to his studio to feel the texture of Longquan clay in their hands, which he subsequently glazed with Longquan celadons. Five hundred fifty-seven of these squeezed clay forms were suspended from the Museum ceiling, creating a path towards a pedestal upon which sat a dozen or so circular clay mandalas. Viewers inadvertently collided with the suspended glazed forms, causing them to chime. In the Taoist tradition, the ringing of bells and the playing of music hold special significance, as they serve as both instruments in the temple and are a medium to evoke reverence for the spiritual.

Feng Boyi, Li Yifei, and Gao Wenjian – with an army of staff support, worked tirelessly for about ten days organizing and installing thirty separate artistic visions into a cohesive exhibition, a multi-media visual experiment that may help redefine ceramics as an expressive artistic medium – a medium that transcends and simultaneously embraces modern, traditional, and conceptual themes in art. The curators hope their “fundamental curatorial purpose” of offering viewers a “deeper understanding of the metaphysical contours of contemporary ceramic arts” will be fully embraced. Judging from the plethora of visitors and the numerous Chinese articles, videos, and programs about the exhibition, they succeeded.

Marc Leuthold is an artist who has been invited to exhibit and create art worldwide. Leuthold’s artwork has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and PS1 MoMA, both in New York City. Leuthold has served as a Professor at the State University of New York, Princeton University, Parsons School of Design, and Shanghai Institute of Visual Arts.

“Crashing Ceramics” was on view between May 5 and October 1, 2025, at the Taoxichuan Longquan Wangou Museum in China.

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Visiting Stoke-on-Trent for the first time felt like stepping into a city — really a group of six towns — that has been tied to ceramics for centuries. The train from London takes about an hour and a half or longer if delays get in the way, as they did on my trip. Still, once I got there, I was impressed. The ninth edition of the British Ceramics Biennial filled the former Spode Works factory, turning its industrial halls into spaces for art, conversation, and most importantly, ceramics. The timing was also special: Stoke is celebrating its centenary this year, marking a hundred years since it was granted city status.

I arrived with certain expectations and fixed notions. I thought the Biennial would primarily showcase the best of contemporary ceramics in the obvious setting of the Potteries. What I found was something broader. The Biennial has a clear mission: to make change through clay. It creates projects that bring the community together, involve visitors, and demonstrate how ceramics can still play a role in shaping the city’s life. Many factories in the area have closed in recent decades, yet clay remains an integral part of Stoke’s identity and future. The Biennial works closely with this history, always shaping programmes that connect with the legacy of the place, its social issues, and its possibilities. And while community work is central, the exhibitions manage to present fantastic ceramic art. Artists are encouraged to push their practices, to go further, create complex work, and to share that journey with others through the films and artist talks organized during the Biennial.

The centrepiece of the Biennial is the Award 2025, which brought together ten artists: Kyra Cane, Fernando Casasempere, Noor Ali Chagani & Clio Lloyd-Jacob, Susan Hall, Leah Jensen, Charlotte Moore, Jane Perryman, Alison Rees, Daniel Silver, and Jo Taylor — selected by a jury from hundreds of submissions. Jo Taylor was announced as the winner of the Biennial’s £10,000 Award Prize for her exuberant ceramic sculptures. Their baroque twists and flourishes seemed to pose a playful challenge: why shouldn’t clay celebrate exuberance? Her work can bring a smile to everyone’s face, a clear invitation to be happy and enjoy the moment.

Other artists also left strong impressions. Leah Jensen, usually associated with finely carved porcelain, shifted to terracotta to reflect on the precariousness of housing. Her works felt like fragile containers of hidden stories, their surfaces marked with subtle clues about unsettled lives. Fernando Casasempere filled a large hall with discarded (and fired) fragments from his studio, creating a landscape that felt like the archaeology of his practice. For me, it stirred an unexpected memory of a burnt house I once visited, with broken remnants scattered across the floor. Casasempere’s installation had a similar weight, as if remnants from the past had been brought together to tell new stories. Noor Ali Chagani and Clio Lloyd-Jacob constructed brick structures that echoed the absence of home, both monumental and intimate. Daniel Silver’s figures, which explored family ties, felt oddly familiar, as though they belonged to a memory I couldn’t quite place.

The Award exhibition is supported by a series of films by Elastic Pie, which offer rare glimpses into each artist’s studio. These short portraits add depth to the works on display, providing helpful context, as the scale of the exhibition sometimes made it harder to form a connection with the works. The works were placed far apart, so visitors had to walk a fair distance from one piece to the next. The distance dilutes dialogue between works, as it was difficult to catch sight of another work while standing in front of one. A more focused presentation might have strengthened the exhibition’s impact.

The Biennial also promotes new voices through Fresh 2025, featuring 25 early-career artists from across the UK and Ireland. Four were awarded Fresh Talent prizes, which include residencies and professional support: Bahareh Khomeiry (Guldagergaard International Ceramics Research Center), Kaytea Budd-Brophy (University of Staffordshire), Elliot Mountain (British Ceramics Biennial), and Catalin Filip (Grymsdyke Farm). Among the highlights were Bahareh Khomeiry, whose pieces spoke of resilience, freedom, and belonging; Nibras Al-Saman, who created tree-stump assemblages reflecting the devastation of nature and its fragile endurance; and Kate O’Neill, whose white pieces explored the quiet drama of domestic life. Together, they demonstrated how ceramics continues to attract artists with fresh perspectives and urgency.

Equally significant were projects that placed process and participation at the centre. Slip Tales, created in collaboration with refugees and asylum seekers, produced a collection of vibrantly decorated ceramics that embodied the joy of shared making. Several other projects, such as Playscape or Johnny Vegas and Emma Rodgers’s installation, reinforced clay as part of the city’s identity, opening it to new audiences who might not otherwise encounter it. For Clare Wood, Artistic Director and Chief Executive, these kinds of long-term, socially engaged projects are at the heart of what the Biennial aims to do.

The Biennial also launched Clay Films this year, a new strand bringing together clay and moving image. One of the most affecting was Majid Asadi’s film, set in an Iranian pottery studio, which told a moving story of two brothers at odds, framed by the steady rhythm of working with clay in (their?)(our?) uncertain times. This section opened the Biennial beyond UK borders, inviting artists of African and Caribbean heritage based anywhere in the world. It’s an excellent initiative, and the resulting films on show were compelling; however, the connection to the Biennial’s focus on Stoke and the UK ceramics scene felt less immediate. Perhaps it is an approach that could be further developed or even inspire other international biennales.

Outside the Biennial, Stoke itself reinforced these impressions. I visited the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, where the displays trace the region’s deep ties to ceramics (I was also amused to find a dimly lit Kim Simonsson in one of the rooms). Even small encounters spoke of this history: a taxi driver told me his father had migrated from India in the 1950s to work in the potteries. Today, some of his children live in the city, although none are involved in ceramics. Still, he knew that every two years something is happening in the center of town. For visitors, Stoke offers much more alongside the Biennial. The Visit Stoke website is full of ideas on what to see, do, and where to stay. I stayed at the Hilton Garden Inn, just a short walk from the Potteries Museum, with a clear view of one of the 47 surviving bottle kilns — a reminder of the estimated 2,000 that once dotted the city at the height of the pottery industry. It proved an excellent base for exploring the area.

The 2025 edition showed how the Biennial continues to shape Stoke-on-Trent as a meeting place for ceramics, and how creating with clay can also mean creating change. In the eighteenth century, lead glaze spread across Britain through travelling workers who carried skills and techniques from one pottery to another. Something similar happens today: artists from all over the UK come to Stoke to create and show their work, and in doing so, they spread new ideas out into the world. Each edition of the British Ceramics Biennial leaves behind its own traces, slowly reshaping the city and reinforcing the sense that clay still matters here.

Vasi Hîrdo is the Editor in Chief of Ceramics Now Magazine.

The 2025 British Ceramics Biennial is on view between September 6 and October 19, 2025, at Spode Works in Stoke-on-Trent.

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Captions

• Installation views of Award 2025 and Fresh 2025, British Ceramics Biennial 2025, photographs by Jenny Harper
• Jo Taylor, (Not) Guilty Pleasures, 2025, photograph Jenny Harper
  Daniel Silver, Family, 2025, photograph Jenny Harper
  Fernando Casasempere, Sedimentary Selves, 2025, photograph Jenny Harper
  Noor Ali Chagani and Clio Lloyd-Jacob, Existing to be Removed, 2025, photograph Jenny Harper
  Leah Jensen, It was Lost in the Move, 2025, photograph Jenny Harper
• Elliot Mountain, A Stale Conversation Between Two Brothers, photograph Jenny Harper
  Bahareh Khomeiry​, detail of Trapped, Breaking Free and United, photograph Jenny Harper
  Catalin Filip, detail of Movement Phases, photograph Jenny Harper
  Kaytea Budd-Brophy​, detail of Beauty in the Breaks, photograph Jenny Harper
• Just Be There, Johnny Vegas and Emma Rodgers, photograph Jenny Harper
  Film still from the movie Brother’s Horn by Majid Asadi
  Playscape at British Ceramics Biennial 2025, photograph Jenny Harper
  Slip Tales at British Ceramics Biennial 2025, photograph Jenny Harper