By Emma Park
Appreciation of traditional and contemporary crafts is booming in London, and ceramics is comfortably established as one of the most popular. This was demonstrated in May by two of the highlights of the city’s art calendar, London Craft Week (12-18 May) and Ceramic Art London (9-11 May). London Craft Week (LCW), in its eleventh edition this year, was an ambitious festival which encompassed over 400 exhibitions, installations, masterclasses and performances around the city. Ceramic Art London (CAL), held in the exhibition space of the ever more developed district of Kensington Olympia, presented stalls with the work of 120 makers from around the world, accompanied by a programme of talks. In what follows, we review some of the highlights of both events.
Secret Ceramics (part of London Craft Week)
The conception behind ‘Secret Ceramics’, an annual exhibition founded last year as part of LCW, was to offer a selection of objects by unidentified ceramists, both emerging and established, to be bought for a minimum flat donation. The intention is that the objects’ makers will only be revealed after they are bought. The proceeds of the sale are given to charity.
The second edition was held at Christie’s, the London auction house. The designated charity was FiredUp4; the money raised will be used to fund the running costs of four ceramic studios at youth clubs in deprived parts of London. Each of the 104 objects on display was offered for a minimum donation of £500. While the makers of each object were not identified, there was a list of participants on the wall. It was therefore possible for anyone familiar with the contemporary ceramic scene to play the game of matching the participant to the work.
In ceramics as in glass, some practitioners have a very distinctive style, a sort of signature, often the result of their personal artistic and technical development over many years, as well as their preferred materials and conceptual interests. In this exhibition, for instance, it was relatively easy to recognise the hand of Hitomi Hosono (delicate leaf-themed porcelain), Jin Eui Kim (geometrical patterns in graduated colours), Anna Silverton (monochrome clean-shaped pots with large mouths), Simon Olley (sgraffito dogs), Chris Bramble (terracotta wheel-thrown vessels, often with sculpted heads), Bouke de Vries (broken porcelain reassembled in new forms), and Steven Edwards (large porcelain vases with intricate fabric-like folds).
The objects were displayed in a sunny exhibition space overlooking the majestic King Street, St James, a district known for its fine art galleries. The room was painted white and semi-partitioned into three sections, each of which contained shelves and pedestals at varying heights to give each of the exhibits its own space without overcrowding.
The overall character of the exhibition was craft and vessel-oriented, leaning mostly, though not exclusively, towards the decorative than the conceptual or representational. The scale and complexity of the objects was largely mid-range, as appropriate to the modest price tag. The slightest, in physical terms at least, was number 30, a slender cream-coloured cylinder made by (to hazard a guess) Edmund de Waal. One of the more adventurous, number 5, was a model of an ashtray complete with cigarette butts, realistically modelled and glazed. A terracotta jug with a mouth painted to look like a bird’s beak, and yellow eyes on each side, evoked traditional craft designs. By far the largest was number 27, a human-sized structure resembling a totem pole and consisting of a stack of strange pink, blue and white plant and animal-like shapes piled one on top of the other.
The idea of an exhibition of unattributed works and a flat, identical price for each of them, lent the occasion a sense of fun. Prospective buyers were challenged to exercise their taste and critical judgement to find the works that they liked, or which might be the most collectible.
Leaving aside the value conferred by famous names, one of the highlights was number 80, an exquisitely moulded porcelain vessel in an aquamarine glaze out of whose base, as though out of the bottom of a squid’s mantle, dangled a cluster of tentacles on which it rested, as though floating along the sea bed.
Another highlight, for its ingenuity and realism, was number 46, a stoneware vessel that looked exactly like a takeaway cup made of cardboard, with pieces of sellotape (actually made of glaze) stuck here and there. In other words, it was a clever example of a skeuomorph, or object made in one material but imitating the design of another – and clearly the work of the French ceramist Jacques Monneraud.
Other highlights of London Craft Week 2025
At the County Hall Pottery, the Glost company, which manufactures artisanal glazes, presented Ground Works, a one-room show exploring the relationship between the raw materials of ceramics, the process and the final product, and how ceramics could be made more sustainable by the incorporation of recycled waste materials. The show presented ground iron ores, snail shells, soil, wood ash, granite, gorse and other materials, melt tests and finished works by eight artists and one artists’ collective. Among others, Kim Hyeonyoung’s display was inspired by the continuous spectrum of the rainbow, and used ceramics and epoxy clay to experiment with fired and cracked explosions of colour that meditated on the complexity beneath surface appearances. Agne Kucerenkaite’s project, ‘Metal Waste is Bliss’, showed how industrial metal waste could be reclaimed and used to develop new glazes in a variety of browns, blues and other hues, without toxic lead or barium. Kucerenkaite also showed how biofuel waste and stone waste could similarly be repurposed for both glazes and clays; particularly striking were her tiles with granite waste inclusions, which formed ‘flower-like’ patterns during firing, eliminating the need for additional pigments. Glost, founded by the artist Elena Gileva, also presented its own collection of small-batch glazes in a range of attractive colours and textures.
Korean ceramic artists have an ever greater presence on the international ceramic scene – as do their counterparts in glass art – thanks not least to Korea’s ancient craft tradition, technical skill and discipline, and the interest in marrying these with contemporary aesthetics. These characteristics were demonstrated by the works in the Icheon Ceramic exhibition shown at the Han Collection, a gallery in Bloomsbury that collaborates with the City of Icheon, a renowned craft centre and designated UNESCO Creative City for crafts and folk arts in South Korea that is home to 400 pottery workshops.
The techniques of buncheong, a traditional blue-green Korean stoneware overlaid with a white slip and engraved and stamped with patterns, were demonstrated in the restrained lamps of Na Yong Hwan and the asymmetrical, finger-painted pots of Kim Sang Ki. One of the most appealing – and expensive – pieces was a lightly indented vase made by the Icheon Ceramic Master Han Do Hyun using copper-red (jinsa) blended clay and a cobalt copper red glaze that turns an exquisite pale blue in firing. Also on display were three minimalist ‘Moon Jars’ designed by Kim Dai Sung, the first Korean designer to be commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and who has researched design semiotics at the University of Paris VIII. Sung’s ‘Moon Jars’ were actually silhouetted, brush-stroke abstracts of the traditional ceramic form, cast in iron and painted black, pink or blue.
Ceramic Art London 2025
Many of the participants at Ceramic Art London, although currently based in the UK, had originally come there from other countries; this demonstrates the internationalism of ceramics and the ongoing popularity of the UK as a place to practise and exhibit in. Both emerging and established makers were represented, with some recent graduates from college, as well as a number of mature makers who had taken up ceramics as a second or third career. There were also noteworthy repeat participants (discussed in the review of CAL last year), including Jin Eui Kim, Tim Fluck, Yuta Segawa and Peter Beard.
The vessel form, abstractions and the natural world were predominant themes, although treated in a variety of ways. Matthew Blakely, with the idea of ‘the kiln as volcano’, displayed vessels in earthy colours and rough textures that were made from clay and glazes made from rocks both sourced from specific geological sites around the UK, including Dartmoor, the Malvern Hills and Cumbria. Thus each vessel becomes a ‘ceramic representation’ of the site’s geology.
On the subject of glazes, two studios, those of Matt Horne and of Peter and Gill White at Woburn Sands Clay, presented vessels finished using crystalline glazes, which contain a high percentage of zinc and silica. These elements melt during the firing process; cooling the vessel down under carefully controlled conditions then permits zinc silicate crystals to grow across its surface. Because of the inevitable variations, however small, in temperatures and glaze compositions, each vessel will end up with a unique pattern of crystals. Horne’s vessels were characterised by brilliant and contrasting colours, such as turquoise and bright yellow, while Woburn Sands Clay focused on more organic colours such as deep blues and greens, and mushroom-coloured crystals.
There were also a number of more representational as well as more sculptural pieces, demonstrating the versatility of clay as a medium.
Emily Gibbard, a sculptural ceramist based in Bristol and founder of the Windmill Clay co-working ceramics studio, makes striking wheel-thrown stoneware moulded into female body parts – eyes, lips, breasts – in bold colours including black, beige and pink. They are inspired by her interests in female empowerment and prehistoric sculpture. The Korean artist Ain Choi, in contrast, uses mathematics to sculpt dynamic waveforms (visualised waves) in painted clay.
Björk Haraldsdóttir, originally from Iceland but based for many years in Dorset, draws on her previous career as an architect to make sculptures with geometrical patterns, with interlocking triangles or quadrilaterals in a minimalist palette of contrasting whites and blacks. The sculptures are often angular and composed of segments of circles or rectangles, evoking fantastical buildings. Finally, Alexandra Breeze, a ceramist based in the Netherlands, presented a collection of wall-mounted pictures made up of collages of blue-and-white porcelain tiles based on the country’s historic canal houses and inspired by traditional Delftware. The pictures were embellished with playful details from everyday Dutch life, such as windmills and bicycles.
Emma Park is a freelance arts writer and contributing editor at Glass Quarterly.
The 2025 editions of the London Craft Week and Ceramic Art London took place in May.
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Captions
- Secret Ceramics exhibition during London Craft Week 2025
- GROUNDWORKS at County Hall Pottery, 2025. Photos courtesy of the gallery
- Icheon Ceramics at Han Collection. Images courtesy of the maker for London Craft Week 2025
- Ceramic Art London 2025. Photos by Emile Holba
