Use of Iron March 14th to April 6th 2013

 Adam Buick

‘My work explores the human experience of landscape through a single jar form. By incorporating stone and locally dug clay into the Jars I wanted to create a narrative that conveys a unique sense of place. The unpredictable nature of each jar comes from the inclusions, both in offcentering the throwing and the dramatic metamorphosis during firing.’

James Hake

James makes wheel-thrown stoneware ceramics decorated with oriental glazes. Glazes are applied quickly by dipping, pouring, or brushing in different combinations. During the firings, the glazes run and fuse together to produce fluid, dynamic surfaces that complement the thrown forms. James is currently developing a new range of glazes using local materials.

Claudia Lis

Iron oxide in a variety of forms and particle sizes is central to Claudia’s work. The soft green shades of her celadon glazes are derived from additions of finely ground iron oxide to the base glaze; the same material, in the form of rust flakes implanted into the dusty glaze layer, migrates through the molten glaze during firing, thereby creating intricate markings.

Suleyman Saba

After formal studies at the Camberwell College of Arts, London, Suleyman Saba pursued an apprenticeship with Kevin Millward at the Gladstone Museum in Stoke-on-Trent. A London-based workshop was established in 1997. A range of stoneware bowls, vases, and tableware is produced and decorated with celadon and iron-saturated glazes and fired to 1280°C.

 John Ward

‘My aim is to make pots which have simple forms with integral decoration and aspects which can interact with the environment in interesting ways; to try to express a balance between these dynamic qualities and a sense of stillness or containment. Colours are echoes from the landscape. All pots are hand-built by adding flattened coils to a pinched base.’

Akiko Hirai Solo Exhibition

Akiko Hirai

Ten Years On

14th February - 9th March

'This year will be the 10^th anniversary since I graduated from the ceramic course at Central St. Martins and started working at my studio in the Chocolate Factory, East London.'

'I make, so people describe, asymmetrical, imperfect and organic forms in ceramic ware for domestic use.  These words become a clichéd description of some types of oriental ceramic ware, and mine. Yet, it does not explain why beauty manifests itself in such controversial forms. Imperfection itself is not synonymous with beauty. Beauty in imperfection only applies when it shows flexibility and balance between objects and their environment. My practice over the past 10 years has been a journey to create this balance in everyday objects.' 

Akiko Hirai

eddie curtis margaret curtis

New Forms, New Textures

8 November - 1 December 2012

Eddie Curtis

The Blast Series of works.

‘In the summer of 2010 I revisited a particular stretch of coastline,    locally referred to as ‘The Blast’ near my home town,  Seaham.  I hadn’t been there for nearly forty years.  It had been the dumping ground for the local coal mine until the mines were closed in the eighties.  When I was very small I had walked along the coast with my father, on ‘pay day’  to collect his earnings from the wages office at the mine.  We’d stop and he would point in the direction of the horizon and explain that was where he worked; three miles out and deep below the North Sea.  It was a concept I could never come to terms with.  As a teenager I would occasionally visit ‘The Blast’ with friends.  This was a place so desolate and grim it attracted various film producers and the iconic movie ‘Get Carter’ starring Michael Caine concludes with the bad guy meeting his fate here and finally being dropped out to sea from a coal conveyor.  Later, the opening scene from ‘Aliens 3’ was also shot here;  a bleak testimony to the qualities of The Blast landscape.

Forty years on since my previous visit, nature has made an amazing   attempt to reclaim what is hers and the ravages of industry have been softened to a degree where a strange lunar kind of landscape  now prevails.  The sea has removed nearly all of the detritus and   continues to eat away the coal/sand    aggregate leaving an exposed shelf, revealing varying strata of industrial waste.  At the foot of the limestone cliffs an iron inclusion weeps red-brown stains into a large marooned rock pool known as ‘Red Lake’. Sun baked mud dries cracked and crazed with    visceral ooze seeping between the gaps. There is an overload of visual metaphor and yet  a strange stark beauty has won over.’

Margaret Curtis

‘About 12 years ago I visited the Hagi area of Japan where I was invited to the home and studio of  Miwa Kyusetsu X1.  My host was his son Kazuhiko Miwa, who had been introduced to me by my daughter who had met Kazuhiko, a potter, ceramic artist and architect, whilst on an arts residency in Hagi.  Miwa Kyusetsu X1 was a national living treasure so it was an extraordinary privilege to sit in the tea room and be presented with three Chawan for my inspection.   It was here that I discovered the beautiful snow like whiteness of shino with dark, blackened bare patches on the body of the clay.

Some time later, back in the UK, Alan Ault, the director of Valentines Clays, asked me to try some samples of a new coarse black clay.  The idea of having a black clay to use was both exciting and challenging and with some experiments, tweaks and adjustments I finally came up with an adjusted clay body that suited me.  I have used that clay ever since and my current body of work involves bringing together this coarse gritty, dark material with the beautiful qualities of thick unctuous porcelain slip.’  

Aneta and Annie

Thursday 11 October-Saturday 3 November 2012

Aneta Regel Deleu combines the natural qualities of materials such as volcanic rock, with malleable materials such as clay. In the new cycle Metamorphosis she is particularly interested in juxtaposition of the natural and human made in order to create a dramatic friction. Work conveys the sense of transformation and illusion of the passage from one state to another.

Mostly abstract forms, stone mixed with clay is offset with dramatic, often radioactive colours and the textures are equally unusual, all of which serve to heighten the tension reflected within the work.

She studied sculpture in Gdansk and ceramics at the Royal College of Art, London. She held a Crafts Council Development Award and has exhibited in Korea, Europe, and the UK.

Annie Turner's sculpture is imprinted with the river Deben's past and present, the cycles of nature and the interaction of man. These are, as she puts it 'objects that trigger the memory', as much collective memory as personal recollection. These encrusted forms: families of spoons, sinkers, ladders, sluices and so on reveal the particular texture and weather of this water land, the character of its beds and inlets, the colour of its reflected sky. The richly layered Meander bowls, impressed with the fragments and detritus Turner has found on innumerable walks. are small in scale but encapsulate so much about the broader landscape, a tidal geography concentrated and made intimate.

Gabriele Koch

Gabriele Koch

New Departures

13 September - 6 October 2012

Gabriele Koch has established an international reputation for making, by hand, instantly recognisable forms: spheres, amphoras and bowls, burnished like old leather and given a special character by the decorative effects brought about by smoke in a sawdust kiln.  But she has recently come to a turning point in her career. After a quarter of a century of perfecting and controlling the ethereal patterns which come from the smoke, a new development is on its way.

Of course, smoke patterning on its own has no artistic merit if the form is boring or crass, or indeed absent. From that perspective, Gabriele Koch is on firm ground. The hand-built forms she has produced over the last decades stand up in any company. They are organic and sensual as well as being confident and precise. Her creative change of direction relates not to form but to integrated decoration.

Her new work, still at an early stage, is a marriage of high-fired coarse black clay with white porcelain sheets partially or vestigially wrapping the vessels, so that form and decoration have a dynamism where tone and texture are contrasted.

With the technical problems overcome, she now presents alongside her smoke-fired work a series of ceramics which put her work into a new and higher league. Rather than being calm and best appreciated in quiet contemplation, the new pots are forceful and graphic. Instead of placing the forms in the sawdust and relying to some degree on chance for the design, she is now in total control. Gabriele Koch has raised her game. 

 

Woodfired

16th August - 8th September 2012

Woodfired brings together 6 makers who use possibly the most dramatic form of firing; woodfiring.  Each of the 6 artists uses the woodfiring process and how the flame leaves its mark in very different ways.  

Matthew Blakely

'Textures and distortions made to the surfaces of the pots, over layers of slips, create variations in translucency and influence the movement of the molten glazes. The dynamic runs, drips and pooling of glaze that occur make the pot seem like a moment in time - captured and frozen.
I am also investigating the effects of wood firings on porcelain and stoneware. I use a single hardwood for each firing. The ash deposits and flame paths create rich, varied surfaces, promoting crystallization on porcelain. Glazes absorb ash and are subtly altered; their increased fluidity imbues the pots with a sense of dynamism.'

 Charles Bound

 

Charles Bound was born in New York City. After graduating in 1962 with a degree in English he divided his time between the USA and Africa. He didn’t come to study ceramics until 1983, setting up a studio while working as a college technician and teaching. In 1994 he built wood fired kiln, which he has been working with since.

Benedict Brierley

'My  ceramics are concerned with the malleability of material through making and firing. I endeavour to capture the softness of clay in the finished objects. 

Work revolves around concepts of functionality and is informed (amongst other things), by early animated films such as the ‘sorcerers apprentice’, where domestic utilitarian objects are anthropomorphised, taking on human gestures and interactions. 

All pieces are fired in wood fired anagama kilns for three to five days, using the pyroplasticity, fly ash and flame flashing of the firing to accentuate the softness and movement of the forms.'

Nic Collins

Nic went to Derby College of Art in 1985/86 to study Studio Ceramics. 

In January 1988 Nic started his own workshop in the heart of Dartmoor. In 1991 he built a large Anagama kiln in which to fire garden pots and domestic wares. 

Since the early 90s Nic's pots have dramatically changed, mainly due to influence from effects of the kiln. The alchemy of wood firing is still fascinating to Nic with each firing bringing fresh ideas for new pots and new kilns.

Tim Hurn

Woodfired Saltglaze

'After graduating from Camberwell School of Art and Crafts in 1987 I took part in The International Workshop of Ceramic Art in Tokoname, Japan, exhibiting at the Tokoname Ceramic Festival. Following this I was apprentice to John Leach at Muchelney Pottery in Somerset for two years. I then moved to Bettiscombe, Dorset to build a woodfired anagama kiln and establish my studio from where I have been potting for the last 20 years. 

I make a range of hand thrown oven, table and garden ware alongside more individual “one off” pots that are placed in the firebox of the kiln.'

Nick Rees 

Nick celebrates forty years at Muchelney Pottery in 2012. 

The Leach tradition has given a clear foundation with technique, form, and process, while Nick’s personal pieces also showcase a subtle and refined approach to shape and design, accentuated through carving, fluting, and experimentation with slips and glazes. 

This surface detail combined with the uniqueness afforded by the wood-firing process, allows Nick to produce a range of work that is both distinctive and organic. The addition of an electric kiln at Nick’s home studio sees a new journey begin, as he explores other avenues for the future of his potting.