Articles

By Alice Fyles As you arrive at the door you hope this is finally the right one. The ground up the drive is covered in mud. Your poor white sneakers have seen better days. Is this what an entrance to a pottery studio looks like? It doesn’t feel anything like the workshop in Hackney. The large windows, green plants, light...

By Jennifer Zwilling Radical Americana was born out of a desire to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, to capitalize on the Semiquincentennial in a way that paralleled the major celebrations that came along with the Centennial, the Sesquicentennial and the Bicentennial here in Philadelphia. As an art historian, the Centennial has long been a focus of...

By Olivia Fero What if the vessel-versus-sculpture debate that has preoccupied contemporary ceramics is not merely unresolved, but unanswerable? Not a genuine question at all, but a category mistake: the philosophical error of treating one kind of thing as if it were another. The British philosopher Gilbert Ryle first deployed the category mistake in The Concept of Mind (1949) to...

By Heidi McKenzie In the spring of 2020, my mother casually mentioned that my father had been involved in the Sir George Williams Affair. At the time, she was living in long-term care. It was COVID, and we were visiting on FaceTime. I had been reading some of my reflections on mine and my late father's lived experience of race....

By Bronaċ Ferran I have come to Andalucia to visit a stunningly visual exhibition, that combines ceramic works by two of Spain’s most eminent modern and contemporary artists — Pablo Picasso and Miquel Barceló — together with a selection of pottery from the archaeological collections of the Museo de Almería and the Museo de Cádiz. It opened in Almería, a...

By Anne-Marie Dehon "The things we want are transformative, and we don't know or only think we know what is on the other side of the transformation".Solnit, Rebecca. A Field Guide To Getting Lost. Royaume-Uni: Canongate Books, 2009, p.7R. Solnit Introduction I am fascinated by stories that melt in the kiln with minerals and metal oxides in the thick viscosity...

By Heather Jo Davis You’re at a party, or some similar gathering that mixes old friends with strangers, and one of the new people finds out that you are an artist. Their face lights up, and they ask, “Oh! What kind of art do you do?” ... What do you say? Do you say, “I am a painter,” or “I...

By Marthe Yung Mee Hansen Nina Malterud has dedicated more than five decades to ceramics and crafts. Many of those years have been spent in the studio, but also quite a few in boards and in the educational system––advocating for her profession and partaking in shaping directions for the Norwegian crafts field and artistic research. Her own artistic practice has...

By Heidi McKenzie Uncertain Ground is Linda Rotua Sormin’s first solo museum exhibition and a culmination of a lifetime of being: of being the daughter of mixed Thai/Indonesian parents; of being brought to live in small town Ontario from Bankok at the age of five; of being curious and encouraged to be creative and to make a difference in the...

By Beth Williamson Julia Phillips' Inside, Before They Speak in The Curve at London's Barbican is surely as sparse as exhibitions get. It is with great economy that Phillips populates the space with objects exuding a spine-tingling strangeness that simultaneously attracts and repels the viewer. This dual effect is not surprising when you understand the deep psychoanalytic roots of the...

By Monica Monaia Come, let’s commune together.Andile Dyalvane Before clay becomes vessel, sculpture, or form, it is earth. It is the ground beneath our feet, the material from which objects have been shaped across cultures and continents. It precedes borders and disciplines, linking humanity through shared acts of making, care, and survival. In this sense, clay is not simply a...

By Sarah Rothwell Sat high above the banks of Windermere in the English Lake District, is Blackwell Arts and Crafts House, the former holiday home of the Manchester industrialist Sir Edward Holt (1849–1928). Designed by British architect and artist Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott (1865–1945) at the turn of the last century, the house was conceived during a period of renewed...

By Tana West Walking into the County Hall Pottery gallery space, you are immersed in the purple haze, which sets an otherworldly chromatic tone to the exhibition. In the middle of the gallery is a lilac-coloured grid, with the floor and walls of the same colour. This contrasts with the ceramic work, which is placed on platforms within, on and...

By Kelly Parks I've spent twenty years watching ground-nesting bees on my Montana property, observing how they select sites, assess soil conditions, and engineer their brood chambers with a precision that rivals any studio potter I know. When I learned that paleontologists recently discovered 20,000-year-old bee nests preserved inside fossilized bones in a Dominican cave—tiny clay structures with smooth, waterproofed...

By Unu Sohn Ceramic Brussels is a contemporary art fair focused on ceramics taking place in January, which held its third edition this year. I remember eyeing it with curiosity in 2025 and, eight months later, booking an apartment in May to visit the 2026 edition. It is an exciting event and the 2026 fair brings together mostly European galleries...

By Katherina Perlongo The 2026 edition of ceramic brussels came to a successful close, reaffirming its status as one of Europe’s most important platforms for contemporary ceramics. Over five days at Tour & Taxis in Brussels, the fair once again demonstrated the breadth of the medium, from object-based practices to fully articulated sculptural positions, while continuing to negotiate ceramics’ complex...

Kikuchi Biennale XI: The Present of Ceramics is a ceramic competition exhibition held at the Kikuchi Kanjitsu Memorial Tomo Museum in Tokyo from December 13, 2025 to March 22, 2026. Organized by the Kikuchi Foundation and Nikkei Inc., the biennale has been held every two years since 2004 as a juried exhibition dedicated to the promotion of ceramic art. Open...

By Chenoa Baker Across institutions in Philadelphia, Syd Carpenter’s work is currently presented through a rare, collaborative model that resists the isolating logic of the solo exhibition. Rather than positioning her practice as singular or retrospective, these concurrent exhibitions frame Carpenter’s ceramics as part of a larger conversation about land, memory, and collective care. This moment feels particularly charged in...

By Viera Kleinová If you are interested in contemporary ceramics in Slovakia, you will encounter it only rarely in a gallery context. A restrained shift toward the increased visibility of the ceramic medium has, however, been indicated by several exhibition activities that have taken place in both private and institutional spaces in recent years. A number of heterogeneous authorial modules...

By Vince Montague The late filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963) became known in cinematography for his “tatami shot”, a camera angle that places the optical lens much lower to the ground. In Western cinema, the camera is usually placed at shoulder height. Ozu’s pioneering perspective placed the camera at knee-height, the same perspective as if sitting on a floor. The viewer is...