Articles

By Stephen F. Eisenman Belated discovery of a mature artist I first came across Charles Bound’s work in September 2024, at Contemporary Ceramics on Great Russell Street in London, opposite the British Museum. I’d visited the gallery from time to time over the years, but after I moved to England in Spring 2024, my attendance was more frequent. Because they...

By Amy Gogarty In Vancouver, Jig Art has a reputation for presenting art, including ceramics, that builds cultural bridges. While the gallery showcases artists from diverse backgrounds, much of their focus in on ethnically Chinese artists. The Greater Vancouver Region is one of the most multi-cultural in North America, with visible minorities representing over 50% of residents. Approximately 20% of...

By Ashley Thorpe Julia Ellen Lancaster has become highly regarded for creating clay sculptures that are as complex as they are intuitive. For Phantasms and Frequencies, a solo exhibition held from 18 June – 5 July 2026 at the Liminal Gallery in Margate, UK, she created a painterly series of free-standing and wall-based sculptures that revel in the material possibilities...

Clay, land, and planetary imagination in South Korea’s leading ceramics biennale From September 18 to November 1, 2026, the 13th edition of the Gyeonggi Ceramics Biennale unfolds across Gyeonggi Province, South Korea’s historic heartland of ceramics. Anchored in Icheon, Gwangju, and Yeoju—three cities closely tied to clay, kilns, and ceramic production—the Biennale has, since its founding in 2001, become one...

By Katherina Perlongo From November 8, 2025, to October 4, 2026, the GRASSI Museum of Applied Arts in Leipzig presents the exhibition GEFÄSS / SKULPTUR 4, presenting a remarkable collection of over 300 ceramic works by dozens of artists from five continents. This exhibition highlights for the forth time the museum's growing focus on contemporary studio ceramics and serves as...

By Anisio Veloso From the doorway, the room looked almost too composed. White shelves ran cleanly along the walls. A central plinth held a dark crown with the gravity of a ceremonial object. Bottles stood upright in a disciplined row. Smaller pieces, jewel-like or badge-like, sat in careful relation to one another. Nothing pushed itself forward. Nothing performed urgency. For...

By Tana West The latest exhibition at County Hall Pottery draws attention to the figurative turn in contemporary ceramics, not just a return to representational forms but a recognition that ceramic materials and processes themselves generate new figurative possibilities. The works in the exhibition reimagine, reshape, and reuse the language of figuration to destabilise ideas of identity, power, and permanence....

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...