vessels

Ellen Schön’s profile on Ceramics Now Magazine - View her works

“I have always been interested in the ability of a ceramic vessel to point to something beyond itself—to function as metaphor. Ceramic vessels, physically structured with necks, shoulders, bellies, and feet, can evoke the gesture and anthropomorphized stance of the human body; they also reveal deep aspects of human experience and of the natural world.

My fervent interest in clay vessels has led me to explore new territories in form and surface. Recent work explores three variations on the ceramic vessel form:

The ceramic vessel as a Wellspring or Womb, with possibilities of both fecundity and barrenness;
The vessel as Bottle, whose forms evoke the elongated posture of Cycladic idols and the scarified texture of Yoruba terracotta heads;
The Planet Series explores swirling colored surfaces on rounded orbs, suggesting planets and depths of earthly strata.

These series represent different but related expressive interests. Each piece in a series is part of a continually evolving solution to a set of questions or parameters I have chosen to work within. The parameters, themselves, may change as the series evolve.

Through spontaneous handling of inanimate clay, I attempt to find and breathe life into form. My creative process is grounded in reflective practice—imposing ideas on and listening to the material in cycles of learning. The material directs me as I direct it. We are in a reciprocal relationship.” Ellen Schon

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Elizabeth Shriver’s profile on Ceramics Now Magazine - View her works

“I work with clay to create an array of graceful, sensuous, organic forms. These pieces are made through a variety of hand-building methods such as slab-building, coiling, pinching, and forming with molds. Rarely relying on glaze, I use textures, stains, and colored clay to add visual and tactile interest. I am drawn toward neutral earth tones that complement rather than distract from my intricate sculptural vessels.

The curving lines and interplay of light and shadow in my work generate an illusion of movement, giving each piece an almost lifelike quality. A successful piece is one that begs to be touched as well as explored visually.” Elizabeth Shriver

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Ellen Schön: Vessel Variations (x3) / Vessels Gallery, Boston
September 7 - October 7, 2012

Opening Reception: September 7, 5.30 - 8.30 pm.

Vessels Gallery is pleased to announce Vessel Variations (x3), an exhibit of the most recent ceramic explorations of Ellen Schön. This clay artist and teacher does not see vessels as mere shapes, but rather as metaphors for the human form –the suggestions of “a neck, a shoulder, a belly, a foot”, “the evocation of a human gesture here or stance there”. 

Wellspring or Womb, Schön’s first collection, evokes the contours of the womb – both fertile and barren, alive and fading.

Her second group of vessels conjures up the long, sinewy necks of the Greek Cycladic Idols and the shallow patterned cuts of the African Yoruba head sculptures. No simple Bottlesthese, but once again, shapes and designs which reference the human form.

And finally her third collection: The Planet Series, is a group of broad-bellied forms with a spinning sense of movement.

The clay directs me as I direct it. We are in a reciprocal relationship. Ellen Schön

Ellen Schön is an adjunct faculty member at the Art Institute of Boston. She has participated in art symposia throughout the world, and has been an active member in ceramic residencies in Malaysia, Germany, Finland, Croatia and most recently in Hungary. Her passionate interest in international artistic collaboration has led to her participation in the “Transcultural Exchange Tile Project” through which her students have created ceramic tiles, which have been included in wall installations in China and India.

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Turi Heisselberg Pedersen: My Garden / Copenhagen Ceramics, Denmark
March 29 - April 21, 2012

Opening reception with Garth Clark, New York-based critic, writer and gallerist: Thursday, March 29, 5–8 pm.
Artist Talk with Turi Heisselberg Pedersen: Saturday, March 31 at 2 pm.

“I love my garden, its plants and vigorous growths. Its potency of growth that within one season can produce an enormous plant from a tiny seed. It contains such a wealth of amazing and strange shapes, textures and colours. Furthermore it is a curious mix of nature and cultivation, of something dirty or beautiful, of poetry and ugliness. Certain things bloom and grow, some go wrong, unsuccessfully. It is a world of controlled nature, which is shaped, trimmed and reworked, not unlike the world of clay” Turi Heisselberg Pedersen explains on the inspiration for her show. Her garden can be experienced at Copenhagen Ceramics from 29 March through 21 April 2012.

For the exhibition My Garden Turi Hesisselberg Pedersen has created a new series of works inspired by the patterns, textures and structures in her garden. In the process of transforming this into ceramics works, two overall themes have emerged:

Vases inspired by buds and growths
On one hand you find a group of precise, simple and cultivated shapes. For example vases inspired by the tautness of swelling flower buds – formal expressions that may seem almost vulgar. Or abstract, simple vase-shapes miming the upward, rhythmic patterns of plant-growth. Both act as ceramic equivalents to the trimmed and cultivated nature of gardens and an interpretation of the underlying order.

The opposite theme renders visible the sprouting life under ground. Out of this, works in the shape of organic, bulbous forms and seed capsules emerge with coarse, expressive surfaces or fluted structures. Careless growths and root-like forms, testifying to the more unruly forces of the garden.

In her new exhibition, Turi Heisselberg Pedersen will be showing some all-new, expressive and asymmetric works, where she explores the inherent character and textural freshness of the clay. Other pieces are more typical of her and display her mastery of simplified sculptural vessels, where rhythm, lines and the interplay between forms are recurrent themes.

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Amanda Simmons’ profile on Ceramics Now Magazine - View her works

Amanda Simmons makes kiln formed and cameo engraved glass vessels - tall, sculptural, thin walled columns - from her studio in Corsock. She is fascinated in the forms created by gravity within the kiln, the vessels becoming more complex as she perfects the slumping method. She has worked with glass for the past 9 years, studying at Central St Martin’s School of Art & Design in London, before re-locating to Dumfries & Galloway in 2005.

She combines these techniques with her interest in making marks in glass with diamond point engraving and a diamond wheel lathe. Her work involves many processes of firing, coldworking (working with diamond tools to shape and smooth) and sandblasting. She recently exhibited at the Crafts Council show for contemporary applied arts, COLLECT with Craftscotland and has since become a member of Contemporary Applied Arts in London. A winner of the Gold Award for Innovation, Creativity and potential to export at Origin 2010, she has just returned from a research trip to investigate the applied arts market on the East and West coast of USA funded by the Crafts Council and Uk Trade & Investment.

A keen supporter of the contemporary craft scene, she has just been selected to become the Creative Business Advisor (for Crafts) by Dumfries & Galloway Council, to stimulate, strengthen and support the creative industries sector across the region.

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David Roberts’ profile on Ceramics Now Magazine - View his works

David Roberts is one of the most significant ceramic artists working in Europe today. A distinguished English potter, he has an international reputation as a leading practitioner in Raku ceramics: a technique with its origin in small-scale vessels made for the Tea Ceremony in late sixteenth-century Japan. Roberts is acknowledged as responsible for the introduction and promotion of modern, large scale Raku in Europe. He has also been instrumental in its re-introduction to the United States of America, where his example has played a key role in the foundation of the ‘Naked Raku’ movement. In his personal exploration of this traditional technique, Roberts has transformed it into a vibrant and contemporary art form.

David Roberts is one of the first British ceramists to specialise in high quality contemporary Raku, the making of which he has helped popularise, as a serious discipline within contemporary British ceramics in the many exhibitions, workshops and demonstrations he has held throughout the UK, Europe and the USA. His work investigates the clay bodies interaction with smoke-marking and deep carbonisation. The resulting vessels are strongly evocative of David’s increasing engagement with the natural world and the contours and stratification of stone and landscape.

David Roberts lives and works in the Yorkshire Pennine mill town of Holmfirth.

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