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Samantha Dickie is a Canadian ceramic artist, based in Victoria, British Columbia. She describes her work as "focused on abstract expressionism and minimalist sculpture within an installation practice." A defining element of Samantha's aesthetic is the concept of multiplicity - numerous (sometimes thousands) of individual ceramic elements that she combines into a piece or installation that exposes the viewer to the collective whole, individual elements in the whole, as well as the negative space between individual elements of the collective.

Samantha notes in her bio: "Integrating a theoretical degree in women's studies with her broad interests in philosophy and psychology, she has become drawn to the visceral nature of rough and intentionally imprecise clay as emblematic of rejecting social pressures, often placed with particular weight on women, to strive for unattainable perfection. For Dickie, there is expressive beauty in imperfection."

Given the scale of Samantha's work, I've included photographs of a few installations and interspersed them in this article, focusing on both individual elements as well as the overall context. Additional photos of Samantha's work are located on her website.
JTW: Much of your work involves creating lots of objects - similar forms. Has this requirement for volume changed the way you work?
SD: Multiplicity has been how I've envisioned my work for the last 20 years. As far as changing the way I work, I'd say that producing large-scale pieces with huge numbers of components has been an entrenched work routine for a long time now.

As you say, the requirement for volume is different than creating a smaller grouping of forms. However, as many of my forms that are in smaller assemblages are in fact large in scale individually, I am still working on them over a long period of time.

The process of creating a large-scale assemblage or installation starts with a preliminary time to experiment, resolve and plan how to execute my vision for the piece. Following that development process, is major production mode with a lot of studio time doing very repetitive work. Sometimes repetition is meditative. Sometimes it is boring. I distract myself from the monotony with learning through podcasts and audio books. I often hire a studio assistant to help keep production going efficiently as I never seem to have enough time.

JTW: There seems to be some idea behind most of your work - an intellectual underpinning like abstraction/minimalism, feminist politics, etc. Are there any elements of your work that aren't connected to some idea - or that you don't understand on a logical level?

SD: Absolutely. The creative process always includes intuition as a requirement to experiment with different forms and ideas in order to find a degree of resolution with new work. At times, such as during the artist residency I just completed, I give myself intentional time to play with new ideas, new inspirations, and new forms without constraint. The place of spontaneity, as you put it, is where the seeds for new projects sprout. Most often I come away with a collection of fresh visions, ideas, techniques, forms, and approaches to installation.

As I often respond to a particular gallery space, residential commission, or corporate design, I have parameters from which to syphon my ideas and visions for a particular creative project. I like responding to a space, or design concept, or curatorial theme. When I have a crystal-clear vision for a new installation in the early hours of the morning, that vision needs to percolate over the ensuing weeks or months for the ideas to emerge that will frame the project. Most often what I create is close to that first vision; and intuition is always the guide. Because my work is often thousands of components, it takes that clear vision to be able to endure the time required for the whole project to come to fruition.

I want to have ideas ground my work. That is why I like to work with installation. It gives me the opportunity to create something that can have an embodied response by the viewer, and hopefully can be both emotional and thought-provoking.
JTW: You mention Agnes Martin, the abstract painter, as a source of inspiration. Are there other artists who have inspired you with their work, and if so, in what way?
SD: A few artists have inspired the way I approach my work. Agnes Martin and her use of subtlety. Ernesto Neto. I saw one of his hanging installations at the Guggenheim 2 decades ago and was blown away. I can see how it inspired me to want to work big and use the ceiling so that the work can float and be walked into. At the time of seeing these artists I didn't know that they would eventually inspire directions that I take in my work.

I admire a breadth of artists such as Ai Weiwei, Barbara Kruger, Betty Goodwin, Dale Chihuly, Hans Coper (to name a few), but I can't say that they have influenced my work.

At times, I have made work that responds to something I have seen from another artist. For example, Walter De Maria's installation in Soho, the New York Earth Room. He filled a 3600 sq ft, 2nd floor gallery with 22 inches of dirt, 250 cubic yards of earth. It has been maintained since 1977 in that space. Incredible! It inspired my piece 'Grounded'. Or while I was in France, I wanted to make work responding to the local surroundings. Vallauris is a historical ceramics town in south France where Pablo Picasso made his ceramic work. I made a piece inspired by a painting that included his deconstructed wheels that I saw in the Picasso Museum in Vallauris. I named it Picasso's wheels.
JTW: You've done a number of residencies during your career, giving you important time to reflect. How long are those residencies, typically? Have you approached residencies with an intention to try something new, or to just devote yourself to work & thought and see where things go?
SD: Residencies are deeply fruitful times for creative exploration and production for me. Attending an artist residency is like a magic break, where I can fully immerse in my work at arm's length from other life responsibilities.

I have attended residencies when I can over the course of my career: 3 residencies in Canada that were each three months (the Banff Center for the Arts, the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture (KIAC), and Red Deer College) before parenting became more all-consuming in my life; and 2 one-month residencies during the busy years of parenting (the Sculpture Factory in Jingdezhen, China, and A.I.R. Vallauris in France that I just finished). As my kids head out into the world, so will I for my work as much as possible. I'm already dreaming of what could be next.

I'd say that more time is better in a residency, but time is a luxury that many of us can't carve out easily. Whatever amount of time, I dive in. I have created entire exhibitions that were proposed, received grants to create, and produced while in residency for ensuing public gallery exhibitions. I have also attended residencies with free-flowing time to experiment, to be spontaneous, to respond to the local environment, to seek fresh inspirations, to work out unfamiliar ideas and to resolve new techniques. Each time, I come out of the residency with many different things that evolve and expand my practice when I get home.

I have three concurrent intentions for any residency: explore in the studio to bring home the seeds for future projects (incorporating different ideas, forms, and techniques); make new connections and friends with artists from around the world (the best part); and make sure to explore the local area around the residency (that inspiration part is essential). Don't just work in the studio like at home, fill the well with inspiration and connection.
JTW: Has becoming or being a parent changed your creative life? How so?
SD: Absolutely. Prioritizing parenting has changed many things for me, some good, some hard.

The downside is that in order to prioritize my kids, given the circumstance of where I live and single parenting, I've had to postpone some ambitions like graduate school that would have furthered my career sooner. I'm now heading into my MFA after deferring it for 19 years. That has had an impact on the trajectory of my career opportunities, but I've worked hard to be an artist and a single parent and have no regrets about my choices. Kids first.

On the other side, being a parent expands a creative life outside the studio and into everything. Kids hold a spirit of creativity that is lovely. Besides having part of my studio dedicated to materials for my kids to use (from watercolour paints to printmaking to soap making), I did a ton of volunteering at their elementary school with art workshops, and permanent art installations to inspire the kids in their learning environment. Now that they're older, they come to exhibition openings with their friends, or travel with me for work. I'm super inspired to see them engaged in their own creativity, whether that's on the dance stage, in the wood shop, or in the art studio. We all need creativity as part of our lives. Of course, they're my best creation (and biggest distraction from my work).

As a single parent, I crave space. Space to take a moment to slow down, to notice the details, to refuel, to catch my breath. For me this pause, a suspension of time, is most easily felt in the deep backcountry wilderness, or even in the forests where I run my dogs or the ocean that is close by. The experience lying under a canopy of trees, or the starry sky reminds me of the minute detail and expansiveness that surrounds us, a life force that is much bigger than us, that pulses underneath and above, where we can sink into, feel held and then stand taller. Finding pause, through any contemplative practice, is like pressing the reset button to go back into the busyness of life, work, and parenting with a little bit more clarity and grounding.

In my work I use multiplicity to create a feeling of expansiveness in the installation by drawing attention to the spaces that are saturated between, inside and surrounding each component, highlighting spaciousness as a point of contemplative pause.
JTW: You say public feedback from viewers is important. How do you typically gather that feedback?
SD: That's a great question. The viewer's interaction with, and reaction to my work is the most interesting part for me. With installation, I can invoke a feeling, an association, an embodied response. I garner feedback at public openings, artist talks, online posts, and from conversations with curators and educators, and interviewers, but I also know that I miss a lot of potential feedback from public exhibitions. During COVID when I couldn't attend public openings, I asked for feedback by email, and gratefully received some. Any gallery or artist talk that includes time for dialogue between the audience and myself has given me lots of information about how viewers receive my work. Most often what I garner is in line with the conceptual intentions behind the work. I hear people talk about how they want to interact with the work, such as wanting to touch, or move, or hear the components; or wanting to dive through, be curled up inside, or be enveloped by the installation. All responses are fascinating to me and illustrate the kind of embodied experience I am creating in the gallery, and how I can evolve the work to be more invocative. My next work will be an interactive installation where viewers need to duck underneath, step through and around the installation while being invited to move the components as they see fit.

FormaFantasma is a design studio of two Italian designers, Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin. The studio has offices in Milan, Italy and Rotterdam, Netherlands. Their stated aim is "to facilitate a deeper understanding of both natural and built environments" and to apply transformative design principles to product design and spacial design (e.g., designing environments for companies and museums). The firm lists some recognizable clients including Lexus, Hermes, Prada, Samsung and the Rijksmuseum. Objects from their projects have been acquired by MOMA, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris and others. Basically: an impressive resume.

I was attracted to FormaFantasma's deep enquiry into materials - of course seeking out how they examined clay in particular. I found several relevant FormaFantasma projects.
Cromatica
In " Cromatica ", the designers investigate the attributes of subtle color variation in industrially-produced ceramic tiles. The designers created ceramic large panels in two "base colors", two "light full colors" and two "dark full colors" using a combination of digital printing and traditional high gloss glazing. The Cromatica project essentially built on variation of color hues and values to add interest to large tiled surfaces. Two photographs provide a quick summation.

Clay

In addition to designing the vases and bowls themselves, FormaFantasma developed the production process to rip thrown vessels from the throwing wheel without distorting the shape of the vessel itself, thus enabling high-production replication of these forms for the collection.

Moulding Tradition
A collection of ceramic vessels created by FormaFantasma for " Moulding Tradition" reference patterns of immigration and assimilation of people flowing from Northern Africa into Sicily throughout history. The ceramic forms of the collection reflect Sicilian " Testa di Moro " ceramics still seen in Sicily today. (Testa di Moro vessels portray either a Caucasian female face or a dark Moorish male face, recounting a traditional Sicilian legend of a Moor who fell in love with, and then abandoned, a young Sicilian girl.) FormaFantasma's collection incorporates these deep historic and artistic traditions while at the same time acknowledging contemporary opinion that 65% of Italians believe that immigrants are "a danger for [Italian] culture".

FormaFantasma's website contains additional projects examining materials other than clay. Check out " Charcoal ".

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is currently running an exhibition entitled " Lives of the Gods - Divinity in Mayan Art ". The exhibit examines depictions of Mayan gods on various objects: ceramics, stone, jade and shell.

Several ceramic pieces are highlighted in detail in online audio guides to the exhibit, providing interesting context to each object. In fact almost half of the audio guides to the exhibit discuss ceramic pieces, varying from censor stands, Codex style plates and ceramic vessels of one form or another.

As with other exhibitions in the collection of the Met (or on exhibit at the Met), photographs of each object (often from multiple angles showing in effect a 3D view) is available online, along with detailed background information including a description, dimensions, provenance, etc.

Jean-Joseph Carriès was an influential French sculptor and ceramicist who thrived in the 1880s and early 1890s. In his relatively short life he created a collection of expressive stoneware sculpture and functional "Japonisme-inspired" pieces, work that was inspirational to subsequent Art Nouveau ceramicists. He is credited by some for lifting public perception of ceramics from craft to a modern art form.

There are some contradictory accounts of Carriès' background, but here's what I've been able to piece together. Born in 1855 and raised in an orphanage in Lyon, France, after the death of his parents to tuberculosis, Carriès was apprenticed to Lyon sculptor Pierre Vermare at an early age. After a 2-year apprenticeship, Carriès moved to Paris in 1874 and enrolled in the sculpture program at the École des Beaux-Arts as a probationary pupil of Augustin-Alexandre Dumont. Failing tests for full admission, Carriès set up his own studio and made his début at the Salon of 1875. While working in Paris as a sculptor, Carriès created portrait busts, mythological subjects, and grimacing masks (reflecting his strong interest in facial expression). One of his best known works is Head of a Faun, ca. 1885, sculpted in plaster (later replicated in stoneware via molds - see example below).

Carriès was deeply impressed with the Oriental exhibitions during the 1879 Exposition Universelle in Paris. (Carriès was amongst numerous artists working in France in this period, notably Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet and Edgar Degas, who were exposed to and inspired by the art of Japan shown in these large exhibitions, ultimately giving rise to an artistic movement in Europe referred to as Japonisme.) Carriès was particularly struck with displays of Japanese ceramics and began studying ceramic techniques, devoting more and more time to this new medium.

In 1888, Carriès left Paris for the small town of Saint-Amand-en-Puisaye in the Loire Valley, which was home to several stoneware factories producing glazed and unglazed utilitarian pottery. A year later, in 1889, Carriès exhibited his first stoneware pieces. Particularly noteworthy were organic forms and the dripping glazes that Carriès employed, influential as examples of emerging Art Nouveau ceramics.

Carriès constructed a kiln on his property in 1891, sculpting a large number of forms that he would then mold and produce as stoneware pieces in the 1892 Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts.

Carriès sold multiple pieces from this Salon show to the French Ministry of Culture (some of these items are now in the Musée du Luxembourg and the Musée de Sèvres).

Two years after the successful 1892 Salon, Carriès died in 1894 at age 39. Carriès' work was influential as inspiration for a number of Art Nouveau ceramic artists later known as the Ecole de Carriès, including George Hoentschel, Paul Jeanneney, Émile Grittel, Henri de Vallombreuse, and Jean Pointu.

I enjoy Nicholas Lees' work as much as I've enjoyed communicating with him about his art. He is an articulate man, as will be evident in this Q&A back-and-forth below. He is also a very thoughtful man, which shouldn't be surprising given the time it takes to create each of his sculptural pieces. First, Nicholas throws a ceramic form, then mounts that piece onto a lathe and meticulously carves evenly-spaced grooves. That lengthy creative process allows ample time for reflection. The end results are Spartan and elegant, calming and strangely energetic.

JTW: Looking at a video on your website, I see you employ a lathe to carve out the negative spaces in your sculptures. How did you develop that technique?
NL: This body of work originated in a research project at the Royal College of Art in London. The rigour of the approach to generating artwork through an iterative research based approach was extremely useful to me - the most important thing was define clear questions, and in this case the question was "how can I make ceramic be only half present?". The question had come from the exploration of ideas around transitions between 2 and 3 dimensions, cross section and solid.

In this context I had become intrigued by shadows and silhouettes as visual phenomena, and what particularly interested me was the boundary and uncertain edge of the shadow, the penumbra, and I was trying to make a material representation of this, and of the ephemeral qualities of the interface between light and shadow, matter and space. In trying to achieve a form with a 'semi-presence' I thought about removing half of the clay substance of the object. This took me back to an earlier generation of my work, making thrown vessels, and the fact that I really enjoyed the turning or trimming of thrown forms and working with clay in its leather hard, semi resistant state in a reductive process.

I was also aware of the use of lathe turning in making electrical insulators (forms to which my objects have a strong visual reference) and in the production of Wedgwood and other Staffordshire manufacturers since the 18th century.

It took me a year to develop the skill to do it adequately, and I have continue to refine and develop this process, and to enjoy it despite the repetition and the hours of intense concentration needed!
JTW: In the video I quickly see you saturate the carved floating bowl with what must be a pigmented solution which appears to leach into the ceramic "fins". Again, how did you develop this technique?
NL: This technique originated in the drawings I make, of which more below. I wanted to introduce colour into a body of work which had been largely monochromatic due to its origin in explorations of light and shadow. Aesthetically I did not want the colour or surface finish to be applied and additive to the form, and for practical reasons I didn't want to colour the whole clay body. I remembered the use of soluble metals as colourants for ceramics (a minority decorative interest as they have several problems including their solubility and issues of toxicity), and thought they might provide a way forwards. I have developed a process that uses saturation and evaporation to infuse the forms with colour. I like the fact that the movement of the colour through the form relates to what I think as the visual porosity of the forms and perception of them as being akin to osmosis.

JTW: How has your work evolved over time?
NL: It is now 30 years since I first graduated from a BA in Ceramics, and in that time I have made at least 3 distinct bodies of work. The first was a series of stoneware thrown and altered, broadly functional although not everyday, work. Alongside this I worked for another potter making slip-cast work, which broadened my skills and outlook.

After a return to education to study for a Masters some years later I then made an evolving series of abstract sculpture using a hybrid of slip-casting and hand-building process and exploring formal concerns of interaction between natural and artificial forms and surfaces and presence and absence. Alongside this series of work I spent a lot of my time working in Higher Education, something I continue to do although to a much lesser extent. The mid-career return to education and practice-based research process described above also involved me in understanding some common threads in all of my work despite their apparent visual disparity.
JTW: Will you describe your creative process a bit? Do you formulate a specific idea of the piece you want to create, perhaps via a sketch or drawing - or is your sculptural process more intuitive and spontaneous?
NL: As I guess will have become clear for the above my approach is relatively cerebral. It is also very important that I think through material and process and the act of making. I do not have an idea and then make it - the making and thinking are inseparable. There is a strong 'felt' emotional content to the work however, and I think that sometimes I am using a semi logical and questioning approach to find my way to some intangible aspects of what it means and feels like to be in the world and how people, spaces and objects interact. Inevitably of course my artwork is also an expression of my own experience and psychological make up, a fact it has taken me a long time to understand, but has become increasingly interesting to engage with and use.

There is a minimalist austerity and architectural quality to some of my work at the moment - here time is an important factor as some of the 'softer' qualities of the work become apparent with looking over time and with movement. This sense of a balance between consistency and change in perception manifested in the shifting relationships between object, light, space and body is important to me and is informed by a lifetime of looking at the same view on the west coast of Scotland and understanding that within this consistency there is an infinity of variety and that each experience of perception is unique.
JTW: Do you continually explore carving and coloring techniques? Work on your website suggests you are poking around with different materials and techniques.
NL: I have been working with a fairly tight format in terms of process for about the last 10 years. I think the limitations of this process have in some ways been a creative spur, and I have been almost surprised at how working in this way has sustained my interest, and led me to look further into the ideas behind the work and gain a deeper understanding of it. Within the possibly repetitive nature of this endeavour, I seek to explore the potential for evolution of the outcomes. Using colour has opened up a new level of exploration and variation within continuity as well as giving a new thrill of surprise when opening the kiln.

The tilting is really about giving more complexity to the visual and spatial relationship of viewer to the object - moving away from changes in the perceivable form only happening on the x/y axes, to a subtler and more dynamic interaction of perception.
JTW: You often work in sets of three. Is there some significance to that particular combination of forms?
NL: Working with multiple objects making up one sculpture is something I'm increasingly doing. Each unit of the multi piece works is usually made from multiple thrown and turned parts and this assemblage gives me a way into making larger scale works.

I have mostly made Diptychs and Triptychs and I think these resonate as historically established formats for artworks. These sculptures also give me the opportunity to focus on the interaction between forms and the spaces between them. This play with positive/negative space takes the idea of uncertain boundary of form further and also relates to the figure/ground relationship.
JTW: There is a strong correlation between your drawings and your sculpture. Your sculpture is much more consistently geometric than your drawings, in which lines frequently blur and diffuse. What makes you gravitate toward a drawing vs a sculpture on any given day?
NL: The drawings are a parallel activity to making - a way of exploring the same ideas in a different medium. I don't really make drawings in a way that is preparatory to making, or a stage in a design process. However the drawings do feed in to the sculpture as they can give me indications of ways forward or new ways of looking at an idea or a process.

I first started making these drawings, which are also a bit like monoprints, as a way of visualising an idea to incorporate glaze in the making - something that has still to come to full fruition many years later, but is on its way soon.

One key this about drawing is that they give a completely different timescale for the iteration of idea-action-result, and so it is possible to work through some things quite quickly and the activity is in some ways an antidote to the time commitment distance between initiation and result involved in making my sculpture.

I like to have the opportunity to show drawings and sculpture together and always want to do this more to explore the relationship between the media and between working in 2 and 3 dimensions. I think you are right to some extent about the sculpture being more overtly geometric than the drawings, but the drawings also give an indication of the subversion of the strict geometry and rigidity of the form that happens in the act of perception especially through movement. The action of water on paper and ink is akin to the effect of movement around the sculptural form. This can be understood a bit by looking at a video of movement across a piece.

As to what drives me to do things on a particular day - this is mostly down to what deadline is pressing. The drawings tend to happen when I have more time and space and when I want to move ideas forward.

You can see more of Nicholas Lees' work on his website.

My earlier post about Paul Gauguin's ceramics has received a large number of hits. Due to the interest, I'm providing some additional, if limited, information about several other French painters who knew or worked with Gauguin and also did ceramics: Paul Sérusier, Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard.
Paul Sérusier
Paul Sérusier painted with Paul Gauguin at Pont-Aven in northern France in the mid-1880s. Sérusier also made a limited number of ceramic pieces, including this one, entitled Bretonne s from circa 1885, which was in a Swiss private collection and auctioned by Christie's in 2006.

Notes from the Christie's catalogue state " Ceramics by Paul Sérusier are extremely rare. This example, Bretonnes, is made of moulded plaster as is suggested by the two vertical seams along the vase, and was painted by the artist. It is not glazed, which gives it a matt and watercolour-like surface. " Unlike Guaguin whose ceramic work is often quite sculptural, Sérusier's piece here retains a traditional vase-like form.

After painting with Paul Gauguin at Pont-Aven, in 1888 Paul Sérusier founded a group of artists called The Nabis who flourished as a group until 1900, and then disbanded. Amongst The Nabis are two painters who also created some ceramics: Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard.
Pierre Bonnard
Also auctioned by Christie's in the same 2006 lot is this fine example of a ceramic vase by Pierre Bonnard entitled " Petit Vase: Scène de Rue."

Again quoting from the Christie's catalog:

" Exceptional in technique, subject matter, and execution, Petit vase: scène de rue is an exquisite and rare ceramic from Bonnard's Nabis period. Like his fellow Nabis, the artist had a universal interest in art. He worked in various techniques and on different supports, including screens, fans, furniture, stained glass, and ceramics. Today very few of his ceramics survive.

" Bonnard was introduced to ceramics by his dealer, Ambroise Vollard, who commissioned and owned this vase made of unglazed painted Sèvres porcelain. Vollard himself had developed an interest in ceramics after visiting an exhibition of decorative arts, and he subsequently steered his artists towards working with professional ceramicists. The ceramicist of the present work is not known - but it was possibly André Metthey who shaped the vase before Bonnard painted it. "
Édouard Vuillard
Édouard Vuillard's ceramic output is more substantial, or at least I found more examples of his work online. In 1894 Louis Comfort Tiffany commissioned several Nubis painters, including Vuillard, to create designs for stained glass windows. These stained glass windows were exhibited in 1895, where a young Swiss art critic named Jean Schopfer immediately commissioned Vuillard to create a set of porcelain dishes for use as a dinner service for his upcoming wedding. Vuillard accepted the commission and worked directly on porcelain blanks in Sept 1895 in the studio of the ceramicist Georges Rasetti. Because Vuillard hand painted each blank, each piece in the service is unique. The exact number of pieces in the wedding service is disputed, but sources confirm that Vuillard painted at least 84 items and perhaps as many as 144 items. Vuillard employed three colors per piece: a reddish brown, a deep cobalt blue, and green. Two examples from the set are shown below.

Patricia Volk is a determined, courageous woman, inclined to push forward when confronted with adversity. I like that. Patricia was passionate about art as a young person, but family circumstances limited her ability to pursue the arts for almost 20 years while she worked in a non-arts career. But her determination came through and she enrolled at art college as an older student. Once there, she was courageous enough to push her process and artistic vision despite being told "You can't do it that way." Turns out, you can do it that way.

I'll let Patricia fill in some gaps in the story I've sketched out in our discussion below. But first, here's a video from Patricia's website that documents her creative process.
JTW: What prompted you to eventually make the jump and pursue your passion for art?
PV: When I was young it was financially impossible for me to go to art college. My father died when I was 9 and my mother was left supporting two children so it was out of the question. Also, the school that I went to, they were only interested in producing women to work in the factories or offices until they had children. I asked for tuition in art but was refused as they said they wouldn't do it for one person. It was only after I had come to England and fell in with a group of people all of whom had gone to art school that the idea rekindled to try for it myself. I went to adult education classes and applied to Middlesex Poly for Foundation [i.e., a "foundation year" of university level courses]. In fact, I only applied because somebody I had met at a party, who I told of my dream to go to college, stuck the application form through my front door. Getting accepted was one of the happiest days of my life.

JTW: You originally created figurative sculpture, but at some point moved toward abstraction. Will you give me some sense of how your work has evolved over time?
PV: I was doing three dimensional design. In retrospect I should have done fine art sculpture. I liked working in clay as a medium but not in the ceramic tradition of glazes and so on.

I did feel slightly trapped in doing heads and they had stopped speaking to me. I realised that pure form was more important and exhilarating to me and it opened my eyes to different artists that have been inspirational ever since.

JTW: I believe your earlier figurative work had references to historic Catholic and Celtic iconography as well as to some more modern artists such as Giacometti and Modigliani. Does your current work reference any earlier art traditions or inspirations?
PV: I think with the lives that we lead we are influenced by everything we see. Some of it we are not even aware of. I recently discovered a very strong affinity to the work of Eduardo Chillida. When I went to America and saw ceramics there, there wasn't the emphasis on the traditional way of using the material in "pottery". In the Guggenheim there were objects that were dug out from under the sea several centuries BC and they were rendered with paints. Everybody thinks classical sculptural tradition is in monochrome stone or white marble but in fact in ancient times these were highly coloured. I was knocked out by the work of Ken Price from the 1970s who used painted fired clay but was 100% a sculptor. I hate labels of any kind. Why should something be labelled craft because it is made in clay?

JTW: You're very interested in simple magical elements - "a curve that might be so right that it takes your breath away, something that's almost like a musical note in the air". Is this an outgrowth of your move into abstraction? Or have you always driven toward simplifying elements in your art?
PV: Yes, I have definitely. Even with the heads and the figurative work I could almost imagine them being icons. When you look at early sculpture like the Egyptians, you can see the artist reducing the emotional impact to the essence and the minimum, and that is what I try to strive for. It's also about having enough there but not too much so that the viewer can bring something to it.

JTW: What attracted you to ceramics as a sculpting material?
PV: The fact that I'm never really satisfied with anything I do ,and clay is so flexible, if you don't like where it is going you can change it or recycle it. I can make what I want, drill it once it is fired, and construct. I usually have a few pieces on the go at various stages at any one time. Usually I start a piece with very little idea of how it is going to turn out and that is the enjoyment. I suppose the material suits my personality, which it to keep trying, but I never want to repeat myself. Every little journey has to be different.

JTW: I get a sense of inner determination and courage, really, in both pursuing art later in life and also evolving a style of ceramic sculpture that involves painting the fired ceramic piece rather than glaze it (a more typical approach). Can you tell me more about your internal motivators?
PV: My motivation is to do something that the viewer might think would be impossible with the material and pushing it to the limits. People in college used to say "You can't do it that way." And I was always like: "Why not?" So that's my bloody mindedness which is part of the equation as well. I get fixated on working out problems of construction and losing myself in the making and engineering. I can always see what is wrong with something and move on to the next one in the hope that it will be perfect.

JTW: Do you have any new projects or interests you'll explore on the horizon?
PV: All the time. Give me the space and I will fill it!

See more of Patricia's work on her website.

I found this interesting online exhibition entitled " Masterpieces of Chinese Ceramics from the TFAM." (Yes, that's Chinese ceramics at the Japanese museum.) The exhibit is broken down into four chapters with 125 photos of examples from the museum's collection spread across the chapter headings.

The four chapters are: (1) From the Dawn of Chinese Pottery to the Appearance of Celadon; (2) Fusion of Eastern and Western Cultures and Development of Colorful Ceramics; (3) Maturity of Celadon and White Porcelain and Emergence of Colored Glaze; and (4) Flourishing Colors and Patterns of Jingdezhen Ware.

While there are links to the museum's website right from the story (click on an image to bounce over to the museum's "Profiles of Works" site), there wasn't much explanatory information on individual pieces in English either on the main online exhibit or on the "Profiles of Works" photos that I sampled. (There was some Japanese text for some pieces.) Nonetheless, the exhibit does display some striking examples of Chinese porcelain through the ages.

On November 17, 2022, at 6:00 PM (ET), multimedia artist Cecile Chong will discuss her stop-motion animation video entitled "Conversations in Blue-and-White." Ms. Chong's video documents the origin and production of Talavera Poblana, or tin-glazed pottery produced in and around Puebla, Mexico. Ms. Chong will discuss how some elements of this pottery style that first arose in China were disseminated through trade and commerce through the Middle East, Europe and on to Mexico. (An example of Blue-and-White Talavera Poblana pottery is shown below.)

The presentation is offered through The Hispanic Museum and Library and is part of their Virtual Seminars with Artists series. A link to the presentation is here.

Monika Patuszynska is an absolutely fascinating Polish artist whose work involves a playfulness and exploration of both plaster moulds and porcelain clay. I was first attracted to some of her early work (2008-2009 "Nonformy" series) where she modified slipcast porcelain clay itself by injecting gas into it as it solidified within a plaster mould.

I love the way Monika brought out interesting qualities of porcelain in this series. She's been exploring properties of porcelain since the mid-1990s.

When I reached out to Monika to ask about her work, she explained that much as she explores and modifies porcelain clay, she also explores and modifies the plaster moulds that she uses to slipcast porcelain. Monika builds, breaks apart and recombines plaster moulds before ever starting to work with porcelain. Mould-making is central to Monika's creative output - the essential starting point of her art.

JTW: You focus on exploring clay as a material. What attracted you to clay in the first place? What qualities do you find most interesting?
MP: Ceramics itself moved into my life nearly 30 years ago and for a long time it has been consistently and irreversibly taking up more and more space in it. I have never really felt the necessity to use any other medium since. Ceramics, especially porcelain, offers everything that I need; it is both abstract and able to convey representational ideas; it has been accompanying communities for ages, but managed to maintain its independence; it serves all the purposes that suit me best- it is tactile, intimate and constantly challenging.
JTW: Can you describe your process a bit more? Does that process change with the different series that you work on?
MP: That's rather the series that changes as an effect of change of the process.

My favourite part of the process has always been trying. It always starts as a thought of trying to find out what would happen if... The next step is doing it.

Luckily I am not in the mass-production situation so I use to the maximum all the advantages that the studio ceramics offers. I have been casting without the mould; I have created moulds without having a model made first; I have been working on solid blocks of plaster and found plaster moulds that I modify by sawing, smashing and breaking them into pieces, reassembled them and cast the void inside, sometimes adding bits and pieces cast from other moulds and manipulating the cast itself. For me, the plaster mould is not an end product; it is just the beginning of the creative process. The process of breaking up and piecing the broken pieces back together allows defining the object again, deprives it of its earlier designed character and gives it a new, different meaning.

In a way, I'm doing things the other way round now: I leave the casting marks on the casts, I am not afraid of cracks or deformations and I am not afraid of the lack of repetition. I break the plaster mould and cut it into pieces that are stapled, taped and cast as a completely new mould.

I like finding out where the lead I'm working on can take me.
JTW: How has your work evolved over time?
MP: I went through all the stages - for years I have been casting in a way that it should be done- repeating the gestures of thousands who were casting before me. However, the limits of "proper" casting always seemed too narrow for me.

There came a moment when gaining more and more control over the material was no longer enough for me. I felt tired of realising the eternal human desire to conquer Nature, which never really felt like mine.

I tend not to believe in anything that I do not experience myself- especially the superstitions concerning the use of materials. There was a time when the list of "don'ts" became my guide through ceramics- the list of "must dos".
JTW: Have you worked with other materials besides clay?

I had a few adventures with glass being blown into my plaster moulds but, as the process always needs another person: a blower (so it needs to be translated into words), it is not as personal, intimate, and natural as casting for me.
JTW: What are your sources of inspiration?
MP: My main inspiration is my own work and the nature of the materials that I work with. By choosing casting as the primary production method I have situated myself within the ages of the porcelain industry and defining myself towards the past and the present also plays a huge role. I am inspired by the process, most of all by its errors and accidents. I constantly seek out the difficulties posed by working in porcelain. The objects themselves are not the main focus; they are a side effect of my explorations.

I do not believe that a plaster mould as it exists in a factory, smooth and fine, is a true plaster. I do not believe that true porcelain is smooth, submissive and docile, even though it is often presented as such. You can deprive your cat its claws, but will it still be a true cat? That's why my plaster is rough and my porcelain can injure, but this is what it is like when you let the materials speak for their own and don't try to force it into a rigid, technological framework.

I am inspired by mistakes and what is usually considered as a defect. I like to play with the nature of accidents and work with them. In our culture an accident is considered an error. However the tamed accident is not an accident any more, is it? The tamed accident becomes a technique. Direct contact with the medium is essential as it is all about balancing between maintain in an attempt to capture the true nature of the material.
JTW: Do you sell most of your work through art expos, galleries or on commission? Do you prefer one over the other?
MP: It all varies.

My process is partly unpredictable so it always causes some stress to try to achieve an effect defined before. Besides, firing the works that are exactly defined before I start working, bores me. It seems kind of senseless: firing something that I know exactly how it will look after... Doesn't it? What is the point of making and firing if you know the final effect before you even start working?

So my absolute favourite is working on new pieces with no tension or time pressure at all.

Creating is an unstoppable must. The necessity of selling comes somehow as an inevitable side effect of making and rarely is a sole reason to create.
JTW: What would you like people to know about your work?
MP: That my pieces are much more than just decorative objects. Each of them has a story to tell, you just need to tune and quietly listen to them.

You can find more of Monika's work on her website and Instagram.

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what sleeps in spring [and grows from winter]

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( Semiporcelain and resin pieces hanging from a mdf and plywood base 100cm height, 80 cm diameter)

86 suspended ceramic and resin pieces ,symbols of one of UCA Rochester's founding college, the Medway College of Art, which was founded in 1886.
The resin and ceramics pieces became the "skin" of memories that concern the passing of time.
The viewer can interact with the individual objects.
This is a literal take on the idea of one memory being more important or 'heavier' than another."
Award- Winner of UCA Rochester title artwork 's competition

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( Semiporcelain and resin pieces hanging from a mdf and plywood base 100cm height, 80 cm diameter) 86 suspended ceramic and resin pieces ,symbols of one of UCA Rochester's founding college, the Medway College of Art, which was founded in 1886. The resin and ceramics pieces became the "skin" of memories that concern the passing of time.

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Kate Lewis is a ceramic artist who makes pottery, site specific installations, teaches, curates, and enjoys clay every day!

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Photography with Sinead
10.30 - 3.30
B201 Maker Space

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Photography with Sinead
10.30 - 3.30
B201 Maker Space

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Suspended Support Structure Building with Rachel
10.30 - 3.30
B401 Maker Space

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Photography with Sinead
10.30 - 3.30
B201 Maker Space

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Clay with Adamina or Animating with John
10.30 - 3.30
B201 Maker Space

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Clay with Adamina or Animating with John
10.30 - 3.30
B201 Maker Space

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Suspended Support Structure Building with Rachel
10.30 - 3.30
B401 Maker Space

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Clay with Adamina or Animating with John
10.30 - 3.30
B201 Maker Space

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Suspended Support Structure Building with Rachel
10.30 - 3.30
B401 Maker Space

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Photography with Sinead/Rachel
10.30 - 3.30
B201 Maker Space

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Photography with Sinead
10.30 - 3.30
B201 Maker Space

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Animating Clay with John
10.30 - 3.30
B201 Maker Space

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Clay with Adamina
10.30 - 3.30
B201 Maker Space

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Photography with Sinead
10.30 - 3.30
B201 Maker Space

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Photography with Sinead
10.30 - 3.30
B201 Maker Space

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Ceramics with Rachel
10.30 - 3.30
Central Ceramic Workshop Space
Ground Floor

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Ceramics with Rachel
10.30 - 3.30
Central Ceramic Workshop Space
Ground Floor

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Animating Clay with John
10.30 - 3.30
B201 Maker Space

Please collect and bring your fired clay objects to this session to animate.

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Ceramics with Rachel
10.30 - 3.30
Central Ceramic Workshop Space Ground Floor

Please bring your Project 1 source material and any other 3D materials that you have collected so far.

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Clay with Adamina
10.30 - 3.30
B201 Maker Space

Please bring your Project 1 source material and any other visual materials that you have collected so far.

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Ceramics with Rachel
10.30 - 3.30
Central Ceramic Workshop Space Ground Floor

Please bring your Project 1 source material and any other 3D materials that you have collected so far.

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Inductions

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Sinead Evans: MA Course Leader
Adamina Turek: Illustration Technician
Rachel Mandley: 4th Floor Technician

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Group 1:

Zhiuei Chen

Yihan Fang

Fumei Cao

Kexin Cai

Jialu Yao

Xiaohan Zhang

Hanting Bi

Group 2:

Shumian Zhao

Wenqi Zhang

Jiaxin Lin

Ana Hasbun

Rucha Thigale

Yunhui Wang