To celebrate 16 years of Ceramics Now in December, we are delighted to invite ceramic artists from around the world to be part of the first Ceramics Now Annual, a new flagship publication created to discover and spotlight new artists, ideas, and perspectives shaping contemporary ceramics.

Published in print and digital editions at the end of the year, Ceramics Now Annual will feature at least 20 artists selected through an international open call and will continue as a yearly editorial project. The digital edition will be free to read, giving selected artists broad international visibility.

Ceramics Now Annual builds on the success of the open call we organized in 2025 for our 15-Year Anniversary Edition, which received more than 950 applications from artists around the world. The response confirmed the value of open calls in bringing forward artists and perspectives that may not yet be on our radar, while giving their work wider visibility. The Annual will celebrate our belief that ceramics today is as diverse, vital, and forward-thinking as it has ever been.

Since 2010, Ceramics Now has been an independent, reader-supported publication dedicated to presenting compelling voices in contemporary ceramics. Our mission has always been to champion artistic excellence, experimentation, and critical engagement while building bridges between artists, curators, writers, collectors, institutions, and readers worldwide. Ceramics Now is read by over 70,000 people each month.

Applications are open until September 15, 2026: Apply now →

What we’re looking for
We will select at least 20 artists working with ceramics whose work reflects unique individual perspectives and the creative potential of ceramics today. Selected artists will be featured in Ceramics Now Annual 2026, to be released in December.

There is no fixed theme. We welcome applications from artists at all stages of their careers and from all areas of ceramic practice.

What selected artists receive
• A dedicated artist profile in Ceramics Now Annual 2026 (print and digital);
• Publication on our web platform, newsletter, and social media pages;
• A free annual subscription to Ceramics Now Magazine;
• Future opportunities for visibility through exhibition coverage and inclusion in other editorial contexts;
• A chance to be featured on the Annual’s cover;
• Permanent archival visibility on our website.

All applicants will receive a complimentary digital edition of Ceramics Now Annual 2026 after its release. Submissions may also be considered for future editorial coverage.

Timeline
• Deadline for applications: September 15, 2026
• Selected artists will be announced on October 10, 2026.

Eligibility
• Open to all artists working with ceramics worldwide.
• Works submitted must have been made between 2023 and 2026 and consist of at least 60% ceramic material.

Submission fee
• Submission fee: $15 (non-refundable). We are a reader-supported publication, and your submission fee directly supports the extensive selection process and the production work involved in creating Ceramics Now Annual. It ensures that our editorial team carefully reviews and processes your submission. We devote time and attention to every application.
• There are no additional publication fees if selected.

If you have any questions, please get in touch with the Ceramics Now team at office@ceramicsnow.org

RESPONS! Norwegian Ceramics 1975–2026 is on view at the Center for Ceramic Art Ringebu, Norway

June 6 – August 16, 2026

The foundation of SKK (The Centre for Ceramic Art) is rooted in a long history, shaped by the struggle for artist-run exhibition spaces and public engagement. Ever since the artists’ protest actions in 1974, the oldest generation of today’s craft artists has continued to express both collective and personal narratives through their work.

The ceramics community has remained in constant movement, driven by artistic freedom and a growing awareness of how materials are part of the cycles of both human life and nature. These artists, and all those who followed, have responded to the calls for change that emerged in the 1970s through shared, tradition-based knowledge and an ambitious desire for renewal.

RESPONS! Norwegian Ceramics 1975–2026 can be read as the second chapter of a comprehensive exhibition project that explores the timeline of Norwegian ceramics from 1895 to 2026. Last year’s exhibition, Energy Transfer. Parallel Narratives in Norwegian Ceramics 1895–2025, explored how studio ceramicists sought to define their role in society during the pre- and post-war periods. This year’s exhibition begins at the moment when Norway’s oil adventure took off and the modern welfare society began to take shape. A time when industrial production was outsourced, ceramic artists moved into former factory spaces, and the travelling exhibition Transformator rose from the ruins.

Artists asserted the right to define their own field, resulting in a period of strong engagement and growing activity. The field of ceramics became increasingly professionalised through the establishment of new organisations, higher education programmes, and the success of government support schemes. When the Olympic Games came to Lillehammer in 1994 and the internet became widely available, new possibilities opened for cross-border collaboration. A major workshop bringing together internationally leading ceramic artists and their Norwegian colleagues was held in Ringebu. The founding of Norwegian Crafts in 2012 further increased opportunities for exchange and international networking within the wider ceramic community.

As artists gained stronger financial support, more people were able to pursue an artistic career. This created greater room for experimentation. Clay and ceramic materials increasingly carried their own expressive language, rather than primarily serving a practical function. Artist-in-residence programmes encouraged deeper exploration, where the process itself became central to the work. Ceramic practice expanded beyond the studio and into architectural spaces, appearing in town halls and other public and private buildings.

Ancient firing techniques are kept alive by artists who build and fire their own kilns. Young pioneers and new generations of students are welcomed into the field, helping to carry forward the collective values of the craft through shared practice.

Current political issues have also triggered conceptual ideas and shown that ceramics can be an increasingly flexible and open category. Critical perspectives do not necessarily need to be tied to traditional methods of production, but can also shape new ways of seeing the world. This includes issues related to hierarchies between indigenous peoples and the majority population, as well as questions connected to religious and cultural identities.

Playful exploration of the material’s associations with both high and low culture has also drawn attention to tensions between consumer culture and ecological concerns.

RESPONS! Norwegian Ceramics 1975–2026 highlights a number of prominent artistic practices and explores how artistic autonomy and experimentation have taken shape in the fifty years following 1974. The exhibition presents works by 63 artists and includes student projects, production from the Monumental Studio at SKK, and artists who, whether briefly or over longer periods, have helped shape the field.

Featured artists: Wisam Al-Samad, Kari Aasen, Heidi Bjørgan, Elina Brandt-Hansen, Neil Brownsword, Marek Cecula, Jim Darbu, Lisbeth Dæhlin, Tulla Elieson, Jens Erland, Yngvild Fagerheim, Kari Skoe Fredriksen, Fritz Harstrup, Eirik Gjedrem, Kari Bugge Gjerstad and Odd Gjerstad, Martin Woll Godal, Kari Brovold Hagen, Erick Stanley Hanson, Sidsel Hanum, Hanne Haukom, Helen Hausland, Elisa Helland-Hansen, Hanne Heuch, Katrine Køster Holst, Magni Jensen, Kjell Johannessen, Elisabeth von Krogh, Torbjørn Kvasbø, Richard Launder, Mingshu Li, Ole Lislerud, Linda Jansson Lothe, Nina Malterud, Nils Martin, Anne Helene Mydland, Svein Narum, Irene Nordli, Trude Westby Nordmark, Inge Pedersen, Julia K. Persson, Pauliina Pöllänen, Toril Redalen, Ole Morten Rokvam, Kjell Rylander, Tovelise Røkke-Olsen, Máret Ánne Sara and Matt Lambert, Andrea Scholze, John Skognes, Astrid Sleire, Caroline Slotte, Marita Isobel Solberg, Øyvind Suul, Ann Beate Tempelhaug, Svein Thingnes, Gunnar Thorsen, Marit Tingleff, Geir Tokle, Belete Wendimagegn, Terje Westfoss, Beth Wyller, Takeshi Yasuda, Kirsten Øverås, Arne Åse

A catalogue published in connection with the exhibition can be accessed here.

Contact
info@senterforkeramiskkunst.no

Center for Ceramic Art Ringebu
Vekkomsvegen 433
2630 Ringebu
Norway

Photos by Thomas Tveter

Chryssa Kotoula (b.1995, Larissa, Greece) is an artist, designer based in Athens. She is a graduate of the Sculpture, Glass and Ceramics Department of LUCA School of Arts, Ghent and the School of Visual and Applied Arts of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. She has also studied and worked in the fields of permaculture and natural building, in an effort to deepen the understanding of the relationship between human beings and the natural environment.

Chryssa Kotoula is the founder of Matters of Concern, a creative studio primarily focused on material research, particularly in contemporary ceramic creation. Her practice blurs the boundaries between art, functional design, and craftsmanship, tapping into the unique expressive potential of ceramics. Exploring materials and their narratives, she reconsiders craft traditions and making processes, moving toward a more circular approach. Through her work, she reimagines reclaimed matter as a valuable resource, forging new chains of value and transforming artifacts into carriers of history.

Kotoula was shortlisted for the Officine Saffi Foundation Biennial Prize 2024, Italy, and was awarded the Officine Saffi Special Prize, as well as the European Ceramic Context 2024 Triennial, Denmark. She is a fellow of the Onassis AiR Extended Research Residencies program for 2026.

Selected group and solo exhibitions include: And Here I Bloom, For a Short Hour Unseen, Volos, Greece (2026), Geography of Intimacy, Kunstlerhaus Sootborn, Hamburg, Germany (2026), We Are Walking, Talking Minerals, Milan, Italy (2025), The Material Way, 3 Days of Design, Copenhagen, Denmark (2024), (un)Known Territories, Milan, Italy (2024), Vienna Design Week – Fokus, Trash, Vienna, Austria (2024).

Visit Chryssa Kotoula’s Instagram page.

Featured work

Selected works, 2025-2026

And Here I Bloom, For a Short Hour Unseen, 2026

Geography of Intimacy: A room presents itself, 2026

Influenced by Beatriz Colomina’s reflections on domesticity and visibility, Chryssa Kotoula approaches the domestic interior not as a stable site of comfort, but as a space shaped by acts of looking and inhabiting. Household forms are broken apart and reassembled like remnants of a dismantled architecture, composing objects that hover between furniture and sculpture, utility and collapse. A curtain made from broken shards is framed by the gallery windows, transforming them into a threshold between exposure and concealment, where looking becomes a spatial act. The floor plan unfolds from the geometry of the windows, extending its logic into the room as an expanded architectural trace. Around these lines, ceramic stools appear like staged spectators, inviting visitors into a choreography of observation, where the domestic is dispersed, observed, and continually reassembled.

Matters of Concern, 2026

“Matters of Concern” emerges from the urban waste streams of Athens and unfolds as a sculptural and archival installation with a performative workshop activation. The project traces the full chain of labor behind ceramic production, foregrounding acts that often remain invisible: collecting, sorting, grinding, measuring, mixing, testing, and firing. Laboratory equipment and cooking utensils coexist in the space, emphasizing the shared infrastructures of ceramic and culinary transformation.

Food waste, ash, shells, glass, soil, and construction debris are reprocessed into clay bodies and glazes. Materials are approached as active agents that resist, react, fuse, and reform. Ceramic surface formulation becomes a way of reading the city through matter itself. Glaze and food share origin stories, forming a closed-loop system in which recipes mediate between ecological residue and public encounter. Glaze recipes developed from food waste are presented as percentage-based systems, each corresponding to a ceramic tile.

At 1260°C, the kiln reorganizes minerals into a stable surface; at 37°C, the body reorganizes edible matter through metabolism. During the workshop, participants translate glaze ratios into edible surface formulations, maintaining structural proportion across these two systems. What is thermally activated in one becomes metabolically processed in the other.

In a city shaped by intensified food production and consumption, the work reflects on circular materials, hidden labor, and the afterlives of waste. The installation remains accessible throughout the event, while the workshop serves as its temporary activation—proposing not completion, but the relocation of transformation within an ongoing urban metabolism.

Part of Onassis AiR Spring Open Days 2026

We Are Walking, Talking Minerals, 2025

This material-focused show is the culmination of Kotoula’s artist residency at Officine Saffi in Milan, where she explored the expressive and ecological potentials of ceramic remnants.

Kotoula is known for a hybrid practice that merges fine art, design, and craft. With a background in painting, ceramics, and sustainable building, she brings an interdisciplinary awareness to her work—one that bridges ancient techniques and contemporary issues of the day. At Officine Saffi, she focuses on ceramic waste—dried clays, broken glazes, unused pigments—gathered from the foundation’s own workshops and previous residency workshops. These cast-off materials are recontextualized into sculptural forms that evoke ruins, prototypes, and speculative organisms. Her work interrogates not only material life cycles but also the porous borders between the organic and the artificial.

Central to Kotoula’s methodology is her reinterpretation of terrazzo, the ancient Roman technique of embedding fragments into surfaces, and which has seen a reemergence of popularity in recent years. Instead of traditional flooring, Kotoula reworks this logic into ceramic forms that mix elements of sculpture and furniture, and play around with any traditional connotations. Clay and glaze chips are not applied decoratively but become integral to the bodies of the objects themselves, creating strata of color, texture, and embedded meaning. Each piece is fired just once, and at lower temperatures, reflecting an ethos of energy-conscious making and structural ingenuity.

The title of the exhibition—We Are Walking, Talking Minerals—draws from Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, a key text in contemporary eco-philosophy. Bennett challenges the idea of inanimate matter, proposing instead that all things possess a kind of liveliness. Kotoula’s pieces, many perched on leg-like appendages, seem to walk this line between the inert and the animate. They suggest a post-human archaeology—fragments from an unknown future or remnants of a slow, geological metamorphosis.

• We are walking, talking minerals, Installation views, 2025. Photo credit: Alessandra Vinci, Courtesy Fondazione Officine Saffi
• Ammoura, 2025, clay, glaze, 41x58x55 cm. Photo credit: Alessandra Vinci, Courtesy Fondazione Officine Saffi
• Latupe, 2025, clay, glaze, 32x78x77 cm. Photo credit: Alessandra Vinci, Courtesy Fondazione Officine Saffi
• Numb as a fossil, 2025, clay, glaze, 174x21x22 cm. Photo credit: Alessandra Vinci, Courtesy Fondazione Officine Saffi
• Medusa (detail) 2025, clay, glaze, 38x40x42 cm. Photo credit: Alessandra Vinci, Courtesy Fondazione Officine Saffi
• Latupe (detail), 2025, clay, glaze, 42,5x32x50 cm. Photo credit: Alessandra Vinci, Courtesy Fondazione Officine Saffi
• Tufi, 2025, clay, glaze, 75x16x43 cm. Photo credit: Alessandra Vinci, Courtesy Fondazione Officine Saffi

Posted on June 19, 2026

The School of Art within the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University invites applications for a Visiting Assistant Teaching Professor – Ceramics, to begin Fall 2026. This is a full-time, 9-month, non-tenure-track appointment. The successful candidate will teach courses across the ceramics curriculum, which may include introductory and intermediate wheel throwing, hand-building, ceramic sculpture, and other courses aligned with program needs. The position will support students in developing material knowledge, technical skill, visual thinking, and rigorous studio practice within a serious fine arts context. This visiting appointment will help preserve the quality and continuity of the ceramics curriculum during a period of faculty transition and ensure that one of the School of Art’s most important and visible areas remains fully supported.

To learn more about the college, our distinguished faculty, and our program, please visit our websites at www.syr.edu, www.vpa.syr.edu.

This position is part of a bargaining unit and is represented by the union SEIU, Local 200United.

Qualifications:
• Earned MFA or equivalent in Ceramics or a related field is required at the time of appointment, along with a minimum of three years of full-time teaching experience.

Job Specific Qualifications:
• MFA in Ceramics
• A minimum of three years of full-time college-level teaching experience
• Record of training or professional experience in Ceramics or a closely related field
• Excellence in, or clear potential for, university-level teaching and the creation of a student-centered learning environment
• 30 images of individual student work from courses taught.
• An active exhibition record demonstrating ongoing professional engagement
• Demonstrated experience working effectively with diverse student and/or research populations
• Demonstrated knowledge of and familiarity with issues of concern facing students from diverse backgrounds in higher education
• The successful candidate will be grounded in traditional ceramic processes while also attentive to contemporary developments in the field, including digital tools, clay printing, fabrication technologies, design, and emerging material practices.
• Candidates with experience developing curriculum, courses, or programs that inclusively serve a student population from many different backgrounds and facilitate community growth are especially encouraged to apply.

Responsibilities:
• Teach a 4/4 load: four (4) courses each semester.
• Attend monthly area and School of Art faculty meetings.

Physical Requirements:
• Able to lift 50lbs and manipulate sufficient quantities of clay necessary for teaching demonstrations in wheel-throwing, hand-building, etc.

Tools/Equipment: Not Applicable

Location: Syracuse, NY

Pay Range: $67,000 – $72,000

Pay Determination: Salary offers at Syracuse University will be based on education, experience, and relevant skills, as well as the academic or professional discipline of the position in the context of the home department, school, or college. Salary offers may also be influenced by prior relevant work or industry experience, where applicable. Faculty pay ranges are for 8.5 months’ salary unless otherwise specified.

FLSA Status: Exempt

Job Type: Full Time

Rank: Assistant

Campus: Unionized Position Code: UA

Application Instructions:

In addition to completing an online application, please attach the following:
• Cover Letter
• Curriculum Vitae
• Teaching Philosophy
• Portfolio Website URL (containing images of at least twenty (20) distinct pieces of applicants work and likewise images of at least twenty (20) distinct pieces of applicants work minimum of twenty (20) pieces)
• Name and contact information for a minimum of four (4) references.

Applications will be accepted until the position is filled, but priority consideration given to candidates who apply by June 30, 2026. For further information contact Professor Peter Beasecker, Search Committee Chair (prbeasec@syr.edu)

About Syracuse University:
Syracuse University is a private, international research university with distinctive academics, diversely unique offerings, and an undeniable spirit. Located in the geographic heart of New York State, with a global footprint, and over 150 years of history, Syracuse University offers a quintessential college experience.

The scope of Syracuse University is a testament to its strengths: a pioneering history dating back to 1870; a choice of more than 200 majors, 100 minors, and 200 advanced degree programs offered across the University’s 13 schools and colleges; over 15,000 undergraduates and over 6,000 graduate students; more than a quarter of a million alumni in 160 countries; and a student population from all 50 U.S. states and 123 countries. For more information, please visit http://www.syracuse.edu.

About the Syracuse area:
Syracuse is a medium-sized city situated in the geographic center of New York State approximately 250 miles northwest of New York City. The metro-area population totals approximately 500,000. The area offers a low cost of living and provides many social, cultural, and recreational options, including parks, museums, festivals, professional regional theater, and premier shopping venues. Syracuse and Central New York present a wide range of seasonal recreation and attractions ranging from water skiing and snow skiing, hiking in the Adirondacks, touring the historic sites, visiting wineries along the Finger Lakes, and biking on trails along the Erie Canal.

Application Deadline:
Priority Consideration: 06/30/2026

To apply, visit https://apptrkr.com/7242636

Syracuse University is an equal-opportunity institution. The University prohibits discrimination and harassment based on race, color, creed, religion, sex, gender, national origin, citizenship, ethnicity, marital status, age, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression, veteran status, or any other status protected by applicable law to the extent prohibited by law. This nondiscrimination policy covers admissions, employment, and access to and treatment in University programs, services, and activities.

Syracuse University has a long history of engaging veterans and the military-connected community through its educational programs, community outreach, and employment programs. After World War II, Syracuse University welcomed more than 10,000 returning veterans to our campus, and those veterans literally transformed Syracuse University into the national research institution it is today. The University’s contemporary commitment to veterans builds on this historical legacy, and extends to both class-leading initiatives focused on making an SU degree accessible and affordable to the post-9/11 generation of veterans, and also programs designed to position Syracuse University as the employer of choice for military veterans, members of the Guard and Reserve, and military family members.

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Chidi Ukwuoma: Containing Matter is on view at Matter Studio Gallery, Los Angeles

May 31 – June 28, 2026

Matter Studio Gallery presents Containing Matter, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist Chidi Ukwuoma. Bringing together ceramic vessels, wall-based reliefs, and a video-embedded sculpture made between 2025 and 2026, the exhibition considers the vessel as both an ancient form and a contemporary site of transformation.

At Matter Studio Gallery, the exhibition showcases Ukwuoma’s expanding engagement with clay as a material for thinking through memory, movement, the body, and the land. Historically made to hold, store, carry, protect, and transport, the vessel becomes, in Ukwuoma’s hands, a structure through which the instability of containment is made visible. Clay is approached as a responsive material, one that registers touch, pressure, gravity, heat, and time.

A central group of vessel-based sculptures, including I’ve Known Rivers, The Bridge, Emergence, Catching Light, Weather Report, The Crossing, Higher Ground, Flex, Nightfall, and The Well, extends the ceramic container into symbolic and bodily form. Amphora-like silhouettes, narrow towers, hybrid containers, and open vessels suggest functional archetypes while also operating as figures, carriers, monuments, and relics. Handles become shoulders; openings become mouths, wounds, or portals.

The surfaces of the works are marked by ceramic glazes and graphite, producing fields that pool, darken, fracture, and descend across the clay. Rather than functioning as decoration, glaze becomes an active force, recording movement across the surface. The works often appear weathered, as if marked by water, sediment, heat, erosion, and passage. In I’ve Known Rivers, the river becomes both image and inheritance, while The Crossing evokes movement, uncertainty, and survival without resolving into direct narrative.

The exhibition also shifts the vessel’s logic into the space of wall-based relief. Works such as Between Two Lands, Terrain I, Terrain II, and Body Map flatten and reconfigure ceramic form into planes that resemble maps, aerial landscapes, cross-sections, and anatomical fragments. Here, the body and the earth begin to mirror one another. Both hold memory, carry pressure, and bear the marks of what has passed through them. In this expanded sense, the vessel is not only an object, but a condition shared by bodies, landscapes, and histories.

Throughout Containing Matter, water functions as both metaphor and pressure. It appears through titles, surface behavior, and the repeated tension between containment and overflow. The works enter a broader art-historical conversation around water, drift, vulnerability, and endurance, recalling the charged maritime symbolism of paintings such as Winslow Homer’s The Gulf Stream while shifting that drama from painted scene to ceramic object. In Ukwuoma’s work, passage is embedded in form, surface, scar, opening, and weight.

In Held, a ceramic sculpture incorporates paint, a video monitor, and looping video, transforming the vessel into an aperture. The work opens clay onto time-based media, complicating the ancient logic of the container through the contemporary language of the screen. What appears to be held inside the vessel exceeds its physical limits, suggesting that memory is not an inert substance stored within a body, but something active, repeating, flickering, and difficult to contain.

Emerging from Los Angeles’ layered histories of clay, assemblage, image-making, music, and cultural transmission, Containing Matter situates Ukwuoma’s practice within a contemporary field of material experimentation. His work moves between ceramics, painting, photography, print-based processes, sculptural materials, and sound, but clay provides a particularly charged ground. It allows the artist to bring abstraction into contact with touch, symbol into contact with weight, and image into contact with objecthood.

Chidi Ukwuoma was born in Los Angeles, California, where he lives and works. He is an interdisciplinary artist working across ceramics, painting, photography, print-based processes, sculptural materials, and sound. His practice examines memory as both a personal and collective structure, considering how images, objects, symbols, and cultural forms carry history, transmit meaning, and shift across time. Ukwuoma has exhibited at the Royal Academy, London; Band of Vices, Los Angeles; the American Museum of Ceramic Art, Pomona; The Clay Studio, Philadelphia; Lancaster Museum of Art and History; Sebastian Gladstone, Los Angeles; Durden & Ray, Los Angeles; The Feel, Los Angeles; and other venues.

Contact
Chidi Ukwuoma, chidi@artbychidi.com
Matter Studio Gallery, karla@matterstudiogallery.com

Matter Studio Gallery
5080 W. Pico Boulevard
Los ANgeles, CA 90019
United States

Captions

• Installation views, Chidi Ukwuoma: Containing Matter, Matter Studio Gallery, Los Angeles, 2026. Image by the artist. Courtesy the artist and Matter Studio Gallery
• Chidi Ukwuoma, Between Two Lands, 2026. Earthenware with ceramic glazes and graphite, 13 x 15.5 x 4 in / 33.02 x 39.37 x 10.16 cm. Image by the artist. Courtesy the artist
• Chidi Ukwuoma, Body Map, 2026. Earthenware with ceramic glaze, 16 x 12 x 1.5 in / 40.64 x 30.48 x 3.81 cm. Image by the artist. Courtesy the artist
• Chidi Ukwuoma, Catching Light, 2026. Earthenware with ceramic glazes and graphite, 18.5 x 10 x 4.5 in / 46.99 x 25.4 x 11.43 cm. Image by the artist. Courtesy the artist
• Chidi Ukwuoma, Higher Ground, 2025. Earthenware with ceramic glazes, 18.5 x 12.5 x 3.5 in / 46.99 x 31.75 x 8.89 cm. Image by the artist. Courtesy the artist
• Chidi Ukwuoma, In Pursuit of the Third, 2025. Earthenware with ceramic glazes, 17.5 x 10 x 3 in / 44.45 x 25.4 x 7.62 cm. Image by the artist. Courtesy the artist
• Chidi Ukwuoma, I’ve Known Rivers, 2026. Earthenware with ceramic glazes and graphite, 18.5 x 9.5 x 4 in / 46.99 x 24.13 x 10.16 cm. Image by the artist. Courtesy the artist
• Chidi Ukwuoma, Terrain II, 2026. Earthenware with ceramic glazes and graphite, 15 x 16 x 2 in / 38.1 x 40.64 x 5.08 cm. Image by the artist. Courtesy the artist
• Chidi Ukwuoma, The Bridge, 2026. Earthenware with ceramic glazes and graphite, 18.5 x 9.5 x 3.5 in / 46.99 x 24.13 x 8.89 cm. Image by the artist. Courtesy the artist
• Chidi Ukwuoma, The Crossing, 2026. Earthenware with ceramic glazes and graphite, 12.5 x 6 x 2.5 in / 31.75 x 15.24 x 6.35 cm. Image by the artist. Courtesy the artist

Subconscious Surfaced is on view at Moderne Gallery, Philadelphia

May 1 – August 29, 2026

Moderne Gallery presents Subconscious Surfaced, a group exhibition featuring works from the 1960s through the early 2000s. The exhibition explores a shared thread of surreal, otherworldly sculptural form across a range of expressions, techniques, and contexts.

A number of works in the exhibition derive from the esteemed collection of Marc and Diane Grainer, renowned patrons, collectors, and champions of the arts, who assembled a singular collection over the course of more than forty-five years. We are proud to present these works and to serve as stewards as they find their way into new collections.

On view are works featuring figures, narratives, and compositions drawn from deep within the subconscious, emerging from a realm beyond the threshold of immediate awareness.

Through incongruous forms and psychologically charged imagery, the artists give material presence to subconscious visions, bringing into view what ordinarily remains beyond immediate perception. Situated between the imagined and the tangible, these works offer insight into psychological dimensions that exceed the limits of ordinary experience.

Featured artists: Ralph Bacerra, Mark Burns, Nancy Carman, Michele Oka Doner, Jack Earl, Sergei Isupov, Michael Lucero, Louis Marak, Beverly Mayeri, Norma Minkowitz, Sunkoo Yuh

What has always drawn us to these works is their ability to give form to something not easily described. They operate in a space between the seen and the sensed, where memory, intuition, humor, tension, and psychological charge begin to surface. Whether through figuration, distortion, modulation, or narrative, the artists featured in Subconscious Surfaced make visible something that remains just beyond language. That quality feels central to the spirit of this exhibition – the sense that the subconscious is not separate from everyday life but rather constantly pressing into it.

An especially meaningful aspect of this exhibition is how strongly it connects to Philadelphia. This city has historically played an important role in shaping serious conversations around craft, clay, and sculptural practice. The influence of its galleries and institutions is deeply felt in that history, specifically in this context the work of The Clay Studio, which has provided an essential platform for artists and helped sustain a community around ceramics for decades. Philadelphia is a place where artists, collectors, galleries, and institutions have come together in significant and lasting ways, and this exhibition is very much part of this larger story.

A number of the works featured in Subconscious Surfaced come from the collection of Marc and Diane Grainer, whose commitment to artists and to the broader community around this work deserves real recognition. Over the course of more than forty-five years, they built a collection with depth, character, and conviction. Just as important, they helped support an ecosystem of artists, galleries, institutions, and the continued visibility of this material. Their collecting methodology is engaged and sustaining, and its impact continues to be felt.

We are especially grateful to Leslie Ferrin for her help in working with the Grainers and in bringing this group of works forward. Her collaboration, generosity, and trust have meant a great deal throughout this process.

At Moderne Gallery, we think often about stewardship and continuity. Part of our role is to honor the histories these works carry while helping place them into new contexts and new collections. It is our hope that this exhibition speaks not only to the strength of the work itself, but also to a next generation of collectors who understand that collecting goes beyond the object.

It is a privilege to present these works in Philadelphia, where so much of this history continues to resonate, and to take part in the next chapter of that story.

Contact
info@modernegallery.com

Moderne Gallery
1705 N American St. STE 3
Philadelphia, PA 19122
United States

Photos by Christian Giannelli

Captions

• Beverly Mayeri, Buttoned Up, 2003, low fired clay, acrylic, 13 x 8 x 18 in. Purchased from Franklin Parrasch Gallery, 2004. The Marc & Diane Grainer Collection.
• Jack Earl, I Knew A Guy, 2003, ceramic, China paint, 11 x 12 x 30.5 in. Purchased at Perimeter Gallery Inc, Chicago, IL, 2004. The Marc & Diane Grainer Collection.
• Louis Marak, Teapot, 1994, ceramic, 15 x 5 x 14 in. Purchased from John Natsoulas Gallery, David, CA, 2010. The Marc & Diane Grainer Collection.
• Mark Burns, Little Absalom Teapot, 1998, stoneware, earthenware, glaze, China paint, 12 x 9 x 14 in. Purchased at Helen Drutt, Philadelphia, PA, 1998. Made in the artist’s studio, Las Vegas, Nevada. The Marc & Diane Grainer Collection.
• Michael Lucero, Face Jug, 1990, ceramic, glaze, 8 x 10 x 11 in. Purchased from Donna Schneier Fine Art, NY, 2000. The Marc & Diane Grainer Collection.
• Michele Oka Doner, Tattooed Doll, c. 1960s, porcelain with iron oxide, stoneware, 8 x 11 x 13 in. Private Collection.
• Nancy Carman, Don’t Look, 1999, white earthenware, underglaze, clear glaze, 18.75 x 8.75 x 15 in. Purchased at Helen Drutt, Philadelphia, PA, 1999. Made in the artist’s studio, Philadelphia, PA. The Marc & Diane Grainer Collection.
• Nancy Carman, Untitled, 1982, glazed earthenware, 18 x 13.5 x 6.75 in. Private Collection.
• Norma Minkowitz, Come Closer, 1998, fiber, 22 x 18 x 36 in. The Marc & Diane Grainer Collection.
• Ralph Bacerra, Head Vessel, 1993, earthenware, glaze, 20 x 8 x 35 in. Purchased at Donna Schneier Fine Art, 1999, from Garth Clark Gallery, from the collection of Peter Joseph. The Marc & Diane Grainer Collection.
• Sergei Isupov, Limits, 1999, porcelain, glaze, stain, 15 x 6 x 6 in. Purchased from SOFA NY, 1999. The Marc & Diane Grainer Collection.
• Sergei Isupov, Swimmer Teapot, 1996, porcelain, glaze, stain, 13 x 11 x 10 in. Purchased from Dorothy Weiss Gallery, 1997. The Marc & Diane Grainer Collection.
• Sunkoo Yuh, Alfred Fertility Chicken, 1997, stoneware, glaze, 19 x 11 x 26 in. Purchased from Helen Drutt, Philadelphia, PA, 1997. Made in the artist’s studio, Alfred, NY. The Marc & Diane Grainer Collection.
• Sunkoo Yuh, Con Man’s World, 1993, stoneware, glaze, 23 x 18 x 32 in. Purchased from Helen Drutt, Philadelphia, PA, 1999. Made in the artist’s studio, Long Beach, California. The Marc & Diane Grainer Collection.

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 a moment I wondered whether the exhibition would settle for elegance.

It did not. On view at Watts Gallery from 16 April to 28 June 2026, Fired Legacies: the ceramic world of Rich Miller does something more difficult than scale or spectacle. It gathers crowns, bottles, busts and transfer-derived fragments into a field of memory that grows stranger the longer one looks. The first impression is order; the second is burden.

The room is not crowded, but it is full of loaded things: crowns, heraldic signs, transferware echoes, vessels that carry more than surface pattern, a bust with closed eyes, ceramic fragments in which Britishness has not disappeared so much as curdled. What begins as composure gradually reveals itself as something tighter and stranger. The exhibition asks what happens when symbols of nation, monarchy, and inheritance are returned to clay and made to live there again.

What gives the exhibition its critical interest is that it does not require Rich Miller’s importance to be assumed in advance. He is not presented here as a figure whose place in British ceramics is already settled beyond question, and the show is stronger for that. Instead, it asks whether his work can carry a larger historical burden than the rhetoric of heritage ceramics usually allows — whether crowns, bottles, transfer-derived fragments, and figurative form can sustain questions of inheritance, empire, migration, and decorative power without collapsing into statement. At its best, the answer is yes. At weaker moments, one feels the strain. But that tension is precisely what makes the exhibition worth taking seriously.

The bottles, including Bottle, were where the show first sharpened for me. Seen from a distance, they had the authority of repeated form: upright, balanced, dignified, their silhouettes almost classical in their steadiness. Long necks, swelling shoulders, broad bodies. But as I moved along the shelf, the surfaces started to complicate that calm. Each bottle carried a contained field of imagery. A gold silhouette, a geometric chevron, a heraldic interruption, a visual sign that felt at once decorative and official. Their repetition steadied the eye, but the imagery kept troubling the steadiness. They stopped reading as variations on a vessel type and started to feel more like a procession, or a line of testimony.

That shift matters. The bottle is a form of circulation: liquid, trade, storage, passage, use. Here it becomes something closer to a vertical archive. Not noisy, not overworked, but quietly insistent. Miller lets the dignity of the form do part of the work for him. The bottles stand well. They are beautiful. That beauty is exactly what makes them dangerous. They show how symbols settle most deeply when carried by objects that appear stable enough not to need questioning.

The crowns are a harder problem, because they begin so close to their own meaning. A crown is already an argument. It risks exhausting itself at first glance. Some of Miller’s crown works come near that danger. They can feel almost too available in their symbolism, too ready to announce what they stand for. But the strongest of them resist easy reading through material presence. The large dark crown, Black Crown, on the central plinth held much longer than I expected. It is glossy, perforated, heavy without becoming monumental, at once ceremonious and slightly hollowed out by its own theatricality. It sits in the room like an emblem that has survived its certainty.

Another crown-like form, Crown Topped Jar, carries fragments of “Rule, Britannia!” across its rising surfaces. That could easily have tipped into bluntness. Instead, the broken distribution of the words across the ceramic edges does something more uneasy. Patriotic language becomes decorative and strained at the same time. The phrase is still there, but its confidence has thinned. One reads not authority exactly, but the afterlife of authority: rhetoric persisting after belief has lost its ease.

That, for me, is the exhibition’s real subject. Not monarchy in any straightforward sense, and not nostalgia either. What the best works keep returning to is the decorative persistence of power: how authority survives in beautiful things, in repeated symbols, in surfaces that remain attractive long after the systems behind them have become harder to defend.

A smaller grouping of lustrous, jewel-like pieces, Brooch, against a vivid pink ground made that especially clear. They looked almost celebratory at first, like insignia, ornaments, or honours set out for admiration. The colour was lively, the arrangement playful enough to invite delight. But the longer I looked, the less innocent they became. They suggested a system of reward, rank, miniature prestige — an ornamental grammar of belonging. Their charm was real. So was their discipline.

The bust changed the room. Up to that point, much of the exhibition had worked through symbol: crown, bottle, insignia, heraldic citation, transfer-derived image. Then suddenly there was a face. Eyes closed, surface glinting, torso patterned, the bust introduced a different kind of silence. It did not ask to be read quickly. It withdrew from the exhibition’s more public rhetoric and held itself inwardly. That inwardness was important. It reminded me that inheritance is not only institutional or national. It passes through bodies. It settles in posture, clothing, memory, accent, belonging, estrangement. The closed eyes refused performance. The work did not explain. It absorbed.

This was one of the strongest turns in the exhibition, because it gave the room a centre of gravity beyond emblem. I found myself returning to it after the more declarative works. The crowns and transfer motifs carried the larger argument, but the bust made the argument human enough to matter.

The transferware pieces were the hardest to evade. Blue-and-white ceramic language carries so much history so quietly that one can almost forget how political it has always been. In Miller’s hands, that language comes back damaged: maps, flags, lions, script, buses, crowns, all broken across charred-looking fragments and cup-like forms whose edges refuse neat completion. They do not present Britishness as a stable set of signs. They show it as residue. Something inherited, handled, cracked, kept.

These works understood the domestic life of empire. Power does not only survive in statues, speeches, and institutions. It lingers in cups, plates, patterns, souvenirs, little systems of taste and display that become ordinary enough to pass beneath notice.

Miller is very good on this point. He does not need to illustrate colonial history directly. He lets image, fragment, and ceramic form do quieter work. The result is more unsettling than a straightforward denunciation would have been.

The exhibition’s wider programme includes a conversation with Magdalene Odundo, though in the room I found myself thinking more often of Clare Twomey, whose work has also asked ceramics to carry social, historical, and institutional meaning beyond the vessel alone. Miller’s most persuasive works are not primarily about contour, balance, or the vessel’s bodily self-possession. They approach history from another direction: through emblem, repetition, ceremony, and the decorative afterlife of power. The link is not one of formal resemblance, but of shared seriousness about what ceramic form can be asked to carry.

That difference mattered to me with particular force because I do not stand outside these histories. I am Brazilian and British, with Portuguese and Dutch ancestry, and I cannot look at an exhibition like this without feeling the wider Atlantic weight inside it. Trade, migration, extraction, imitation, ceremony, the movement of goods and symbols – ceramics is bound up with all of that. Porcelain especially cannot be separated from the routes of commerce and desire that helped shape colonial modernity. To work with porcelain now is to touch, however indirectly, a material history shaped by global exchange and imperial appetite.

This is why the exhibition is more persuasive than its own theme might sound on paper. If one described it simply as a show about British colonial history, migration, and identity, one might expect work that was worthy but predictable, or too dependent on wall text to do its job. In the room, the better works avoid that fate because they are first of all objects – exact, attractive, disciplined objects that allow discomfort to emerge from form rather than slogan.

That is not true of every piece equally. There are moments where the crown motif, in particular, risks becoming too legible too quickly. Some works carry their symbolism openly enough that they do not continue to deepen after the first encounter. But even that unevenness is useful. It clarifies where Miller’s practice has most force. He is strongest when symbol has been made to pass through repetition, fracture, or bodily inwardness, the bottles, the transferware pieces, the bust, and weaker when the emblem is left to carry too much on its own. The exhibition does not hide those limits, and to its credit, it does not need to. A serious show need not make every work equally persuasive; it needs to reveal where the artist’s real pressure lies.

The exhibition also helped me think again about seriousness in ceramics. There is a temptation, especially for those of us working through porcelain and through questions of fragility, to assume that quietness is the more intelligent mode. Muted surfaces, reduced forms, moral tactility, anti-ornamental restraint – all of that can become a kind of default virtue. Miller complicates that. He shows that decoration and historical charge can also be handled critically, provided the form is exact enough to bear them. That is not an easier discipline than reduction. In some ways it is riskier. Excess collapses into noise very quickly. Miller’s best works stay just on the right side of that danger.

What remained with me after leaving was not one dominant piece but a sequence of returns: the line of bottles becoming more accusatory as I moved along it; the dark crown holding its theatricality without quite surrendering to it; the transfer-derived works making Britishness feel less symbolic than domestic and inherited; the bust changing the room from emblem to body. That is why the exhibition stayed with me. It did not simply make an argument about history. It altered the speed and quality of looking.

Fired Legacies succeeds because it understands that empire rarely leaves cleanly. It remains in ornament, on shelves, in ceremony, in repeatable forms of beauty, in objects handed down or bought or displayed without quite knowing what they still carry. Ceramics is one of the places where those residues remain closest to hand. Miller knows this, and he is at his best when he trusts the object enough to let it disclose that burden slowly.

The room begins in poise. It ends somewhere else: not in certainty, but in the recognition that decorative form can hold far more history than it first admits.

Anisio Veloso is a Brazilian-born British doctor, ceramic artist, and independent visual arts scholar based in the UK. He is currently working on a book, Where Error Does Not Injure: Medicine, Porcelain, and the Ethics of Attention.

Fired Legacies: The Ceramic World of Rich Miller is on view between April 16 and June 28, 2026, at Watts Gallery, Compton, Surrey.

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Photos by Libby Whyte, except otherwise noted

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. The exhibiting artists are Claire Curneen, Fernanda Cortes, Jessica Harrison, and John Rainey.

Canonically within the Western sculptural tradition, ceramics occupies an outsider position. Clay was long treated as a preparatory medium, a material for sketching, modelling, or “roughing out” forms before they were realised in the more ‘noble’ materials of bronze, wood, or stone. This relegation positioned ceramics as ancillary to sculpture rather than a sculptural medium in its own right. Yet clay has always carried forms of human presence, mythic, classical, and domestic that are anything but neutral. The recognisable bodies and iconography that emerge from ceramic traditions hold meanings that are deeply culturally specific, shaped by the contexts in which they were made and used. They resist the fantasy of universality that has long underpinned Western art history.

The design of the exhibition space sets the scene by mimicking the institutional framework of 19th century museum cast courts and sculptural displays, adopting their visual language, plinths, painted alcoves, and calibrated colour schemes. The artists in Refigured have made use of the visual and material language of monumental, religious, and classical statuary and figurines as well as of their copies, casts, and reproductions. Mixing up this sculptural syntax and subverting conventions using approaches such as fragmentation, shifts in scale and material specificity. In doing so, the artists expose the constructed nature of these sculptural traditions and open them up to reinterpretation. Their works reveal that the authority of classical and religious statuary is not fixed, but something that can be reworked, questioned, and refigured.

Humans are intrinsically wired to perceive and connect through embodied cues like gestures and facial expressions. However, from a neurodiverse perspective, this recognition is often highly individualised, some people read emotional states through gestures, others through pattern, narrative, or symbolic association. Figurative sculpture works on multiple registers, psychological, spiritual and material, to access what is not directly visible, mediating between inner and outer worlds.

In Italian renaissance art, thresholds refer to the physical and symbolic boundaries between the secular world and the sacred. Claire Curneen’s figures have retained clear vestiges of the sacred, with reference to Catholic iconography, mythological archetypes, and an animistic understanding of matter. Curneen uses this liminal register in her work to highlight that which is most human, doubt, hesitation, grief, ecstasy, resilience, and vulnerability. The first thing I am drawn to in the work is the hands, with their slightly exaggerated proportion and elongated fingers, they do the heavy lifting of conveying the underlying feeling of a piece. What you also notice is the finger marks across the figures surface, visible signs of them having been hand-built from clay pressed into the palm of the artist’s hand, an intimate touch, and joined together to make the sculpture, this is what Claire Curneen has described as ‘spectacle of making’. In ‘Flower Figure’ we see a closer association with Renaissance ceramics particularly the glazed terracottas of the Della Robbia workshop. The use of tin white glaze situates this work within that lineage, but Curneen pushes the material beyond its historical connection. The figure is overwhelmed with foliage, partially hidden from view, its chromatic instability mirroring emotional uncertainty, as if the figure’s inner state is made visible through the unpredictable nature of the ceramic materials, the tin having been tinged pink in the presence of chrome in the kiln.

Fernanda Cortés is another artist in this exhibition whose figures feel present but not fully of this world, translating abstract psychological states into tangible hand‑built animal–human hybrids that occupy the border territory of the human and non-human. Cortes’ ceramic figures have detailed backstories, fleshed out narratives accompany the sculptures, resisting dehumanisation. Stories restore complexities to bodies that might otherwise be read through reductive frames, insisting on interiority, memory, and lived experience. Cortes has said that her family’s dogs have been a great source for her work and she ‘always felt more accompanied and loved in their presence’. In Mesoamerican folklore, dogs are often liminal beings, creatures that straddle the threshold between the living and the dead, the human and the divine, and the civilised and the wild. These emotional thresholds are present in the work ‘Bad Friendships’, sat cross-legged, the pug faced figure clings tightly to grotesque pink lustred babies. From its glassy eyes, pearlescent tears flow down in torrents, staining the white stoneware body. The ‘otherness’ of animal-human hybrids allows a fraction of distance to safely examine dense emotions like grief, resilience, loneliness without being too literal or personally exposed.

Both Cortes and Curneen use figuration to access interior states and in this, clay and ceramic processes become mediators between inner and outer worlds. John Rainey extends the exhibition’s concern with figuration into post-digital space, where bodies are endlessly reproduced and altered and traditional figuration thresholds breakdown. Using the language of classical sculpture, Rainey reveals the plasticity of digital culture and the fragmentation of identity that is constructed, performed, and disseminated. Using creative commons-scans of classical sculptures, Rainey re-mixes the sculptural lexicon, tapping into a history of reproductions, from Roman copies of Greek statues to reflections of nationalistic propaganda. Disrupting classical sculptures’ emphasis on bodily ideas, gendered expectations and whiteness. Rainey combines digital fabrication and traditional casting techniques using parian porcelain, a material developed in the 19th century to mass produce domestic scale copies of classical sculptures, to make ‘Relics from an alternative reality’. He has exploited Parian’s material behaviour, both through the casting process and how it slumps at high temperatures, ‘The Deflatables’ is two partially deflated pink bodied torsos with air valves are on marbled pedestals, not quite mirror images of themselves. Colour, artifice and humour are wielded throughout Rainey’s work and is extended to ‘A Peeling’ where the classical sculpture has had its marbled skin pulled back like a latex suit, its edges wrinkled up, to reveal a fleshy interior. This follows illusionistic sculptural traditions of replicating fabric folds in stone but has camped it up, the interior is a fake, a digital surface that is our mediated reality.

Jessica Harrison’s work also operates within this mediated reality, using online platforms and the proliferation of images to generate the ‘Vandalised Sculptures’ series. She has used internet searches of the same phrase to find images capturing the moment contested public sculptures have been torn down or defaced. Harrison has turned these into work that resemble artists scaled-down maquettes for monumental sculptures. Public statues are not neutral, they are inherently performative, designed to project power, authority, and a static universality. This apparent permanence masks more complex histories and privileges certain bodies, and values while marginalising others. Public statues become points of action and Harrison’s work captures the pomposity of public statues, knocked off their pedestals, these public figures have complicated legacies that may continue to cause harm. Defacing statues and other forms of public figuration is not simply an act of vandalism but a visible assertion of competing tastes, values, and historical interpretations. The act of defacement reveals the instability of figuration, it is complex, plastic and defined as much by what is removed or obscured as by what remains. In Harrison’s ‘found figurines’ series, mass produced ‘Pretty Ladies’ figurines, sourced from online auction sites have been encased in thick fragmentary glazes through multiple firings, covering up the kitch. In both bodies of work, circulation, whether through viral images or auction listings, becomes a mechanism through which figuration is re-authored. Harrison retains in the titles of each piece the wording of the original listings, including typos, errors, and seductive sales descriptions, this individualises the figures and the collectors who presented them. Harrison’s work reveals that figuration, especially public statuary, is not fixed but continually renegotiated through acts of circulation, damage, and reinterpretation.

What the exhibition ultimately proposes is a mode of figuration grounded in relation rather than representation. Bodies are not presented as coherent or complete, but as porous, mediated, and in flux. Meaning does not reside solely in the image of the figure, but in the processes that produce, alter, and circulate it. Curneen shows how the figure becomes a site where spiritual authority and emotional certainty unravel. Her sculptures fragment inherited sacred codes, allowing vulnerability, hesitation, and material instability to erode the hierarchies embedded in classical and religious statuary. Cortes mobilises hybrid, narrative‑laden bodies to challenge the boundaries that define who is recognised as fully human, using folklore and emotional storytelling to unsettle normative frames. Rainey exposes the fragility of the authority of canonical figuration, showing how identity is continually reassembled through technological reproduction and material slippage and lastly Harrison turns to toppled monuments and over‑fired figurines to reveal how public and domestic bodies accrue meaning through circulation, damage, and contestation. By re‑authoring these forms, she collapses the hierarchy between monumental and kitsch, demonstrating that figuration’s power is always provisional and open to renegotiation.

The exhibition’s staging within the visual language of the cast court is central to this reading. By invoking the authority of 19th-century sculptural display, Refigured situates itself within a lineage that has long privileged permanence, monumentality, and idealised form. The works resist the fixity implied by their surroundings, instead revealing the extent to which these traditions are themselves constructed, contingent, and open to revision. The cast court becomes less a site of preservation than one of interrogation, where inherited sculptural languages are reworked and destabilised.

Within this context, ceramics emerges not as peripheral to sculpture but as a critical medium through which to rethink it. Historically positioned as subordinate, clay here demonstrates its capacity to hold complexity, contradiction, and transformation. Its responsiveness to touch, its susceptibility to change, and its capacity to register process make it uniquely equipped to articulate a form of figuration that is fluid rather than fixed. Refigured is not an exhibition of figurative ceramics, but instead how figuration is understood and produced in contemporary ceramics. The artists use the figurative as a site of negotiation, mobilising the materials and visual codes of canonical sculpture precisely to expose the authority those traditions claim. Bodies are fragmented, power is undermined, and historic and material hierarchies are collapsed.

Tana West works predominantly with ceramic processes, using the language of ceramic materials and object making to connect with social, political and environmental contexts. Her interdisciplinary practice is grounded in environmental research, writing and collaboration, including examining climate change narratives through the lens of materiality ‘Representing Uncertainty: The Object of Climate Change’ and investigations into apple culture, brownfield sites and water ecologies. West received the British Ceramics Biennial Award for [UN]WOVEN and has produced major commissions for Jerwood Makers Open and the Whitegold International Ceramics Prize.

Refigured is on view between May 12 and June 21 at County Hall Pottery, London.

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Photos © Reinis Lismanis

The 52nd Congress and General Assembly of the International Academy of Ceramics (IAC) will take place in Jingdezhen, China, from June 27 to July 2, 2026. Hosted by Jingdezhen Ceramic University and the Jingdezhen Municipal Government, the congress explores Inheritance and Innovation through conferences, panel discussions, museum visits, cultural programmes, and exhibitions across the city. Among the exhibitions not to miss are the IAC International Members’ Exhibition and IAC International Residencies Exhibition at Taoxichuan Art Museum, both opening June 28, and Future Vision, presenting around 200 works by new IAC members, opening June 30. We also recommend the regional exhibitions at the Jingdezhen Grand Bowl, including Ontologies of Touch, Postcards from the Monsoon Belt, and Latin America: Territory and Ceramics, as well as Breaking Through the Earth, exploring intersections between clay, architecture, and public space.

County Hall Pottery in London is inviting applications for its 2027 Potter in Residence Programme, a year-long opportunity for makers working with clay across design, function, fine art, craft, and experimental practice. The residency runs from January 4 to December 23, 2027, and combines supported studio time with a part-time role contributing 20 hours per week to the studio, gallery, and teaching programme. The selected resident will receive dedicated studio space, kiln and materials access, professional support, a solo exhibition, and a £20,000 salary. Applicants must have the legal right to live and work in the UK. Applications close July 30, 2026.

There are just two weeks left to apply for the 2027 Taiwan Ceramics Residency Program, offering artists the opportunity to work in Yingge, one of Taiwan’s most significant ceramic centers. Residents will spend 60 to 90 days developing their practice within a fully equipped studio environment, while engaging with local craftspeople and ceramic traditions. The program provides material support, accommodation, and travel reimbursement. Applications are due June 30, 2026.

Applications also close next week for the sixth edition of the Officine Saffi Award. Participation is free, with a €10,000 First Prize and six Residency Prizes developed in collaboration with international institutions. This year’s theme, Forms of Belonging, invites artists to explore ceramics as a material language of connection, recognition, and shared experience. Applications are due June 26, 2026, and the exhibition opens in late September.

Ceramic artists are also invited to apply for the Virginia A. Groot Foundation Grant, which supports artists in developing their work and advancing their careers. Each year, the foundation awards three major grants: $60,000 for First Place, $30,000 for Second Place, and $20,000 for Third Place. Open to artists aged 21 and over who are not currently enrolled in higher education, the grant is intended to support time, travel, materials, and creative development. Applications are due January 9, 2027.

The Biennale of Contemporary Keramics 2026 recently opened in the city of Rhodes, Greece, and will remain on view until October 31, 2026. Titled Where the Day Starts, the second edition brings together 42 artists connected to the Mediterranean, exploring the region’s histories, traditions, and possible futures through contemporary ceramics. Curated by Stamatia Dimitrakopoulos, Loukia Thomopoulou, and Anissa Touati, the biennale reflects on migration, exchange, identity, and the enduring links between ceramic practice and Mediterranean culture. A very good excuse to visit Rhodes this year.

Later this month, Saint-Sulpice Céramique returns to the iconic Place Saint-Sulpice in Paris, bringing together more than 100 ceramic artists from around the world. Visitors can discover a wide range of sculptural and functional works. This year’s collective focus, Hut(s), explores shelter as a space between interior and exterior. The programme also includes daily talks, free workshops for children and adults, and a Ceramic Café where visitors can discuss making processes & summer plans over a handmade cup.

Pentimenti Gallery in Philadelphia is inviting artists working in clay to submit work for an upcoming group exhibition opening in November 2026. The exhibition will present contemporary ceramic works created within the last two years. Artists working across sculpture, vessel-based forms, abstraction, conceptual approaches, and experimental processes are welcome to apply. Applications close July 6, 2026.

Exhibitions

Discover these ceramic exhibitions that were recently featured in Ceramics Now.

• For Want of a Nail, the Golden Shoe was Lost at Studio Orta – Les Moulins, Boissy-Le-Châtel
• Anina Major: Tender Seedlings at Larkin Durey, London
• Susie Choi: Right Side Wrong Side at Sabbia Gallery, Sydney
• Porcelain Reconsidered at Vessels + Sticks, Toronto
• A Form of Reverence at the Jane Hartsook Gallery, New York
• Shared Material at &Gallery, Edinburgh

What’s on View

A selection of ceramic exhibitions currently on view around the world.

1. Glenn Barkley: In the Cactus Garden at Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami
2. Pursuing Possibilities: Explorations in Glaze at The Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY
3. Tōgei: Contemporary Japanese Ceramics at AMOCA, Pomona, CA
4. Lily Fein: Night Blooms at Lucy Lacoste Gallery, Concord, MA
5. Serena Korda: Triple Goddess at the Harley Gallery, Worksop, Nottinghamshire
6. Bouchra Bodoua: Vestige at Florian Daguet Bresson, Paris
7. Distant Lands at Ligenza Moore Gallery, Cold Spring, NY
8. Keiyona Stumpf: Subtle Sensuality at SCHENKWEITZDÖRFER, Cologne
9. Chidi Ukwuoma: Containing Matter at Matter Studio Gallery, Los Angeles
10. Emergence at The Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery, Waterloo, Ontario

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Featured image – Glenn Barkley: In the Cactus Garden at Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami

Shared Material is on view at &Gallery, Edinburgh

June 6 – July 1, 2026

Exhibiting artists: A-S Rope, Dan Kelly, Derek Wilson, Frances Priest, Jane Cairns, Lorraine Robson, Matthew Chambers, Nicholas Lees, Rebecca Appleby, Roger Coll, Steven Edwards

&Gallery is delighted to announce our debut ceramics exhibition, Shared Material. Bringing together a dynamic group of practitioners, the exhibition introduces seven artists exhibiting with the gallery for the first time, alongside gallery artists Derek Wilson, Frances Priest, Lorraine Robson and Rebecca Appleby.

Showcasing contemporary sculptural approaches to ceramics, the exhibition features eleven artists working across the UK and Europe. Using clay as a shared point of departure, the exhibition highlights the diversity of approaches, forms and ideas that emerge through individual practices. While united by material, the works reveal distinct sensibilities, ranging from precise and architectural to expressive and intuitive, demonstrating the breadth of contemporary ceramic practice. The exhibition will showcase both wall and plinth based ceramic pieces.

Across the exhibition, the familiar language of ceramics, including throwing, hand building, and slip casting, is reconfigured as a means of sculptural enquiry. Long associated with function and tradition, clay is extended here into a more experimental and exploratory field.

For many of the artists, the vessel operates as both a point of origin and a structure to be tested. Forms are cut, stretched, repeated or destabilised, shifting from contained objects into spatial constructions that engage with architecture and balance. Elsewhere, process remains visible: gestures are preserved in the surface, and the material records acts of making through seams, joins and traces of touch.

Surface becomes a key area of focus. In some works, it is restrained and tonal, emphasising volume and proportion; in others, it is activated through pattern, line and colour, where clay functions as a ground for drawing and ornament. These approaches demonstrate how meaning is shaped not only through form, but through how each piece is finished, interrupted or left open.

A shared attention to systems and repetition runs throughout the exhibition, whether through the logic of the wheel, modular construction or incremental variation. This is often offset by moments of disruption: asymmetry, collapse or intuitive intervention. The works move between control and contingency, reflecting the tension between intention and material behaviour.

Rather than presenting a single position, the exhibition brings together distinct but interconnected practices. Collectively, they map a field in which ceramics operates as an expanded discipline, moving between sculpture and object, structure and gesture, and precision and variation.

Seen in this way, clay emerges not simply as a medium, but as an active collaborator: a material that resists, records and ultimately shapes the forms it becomes.

Contact
info@andgallery.co.uk

&Gallery
3 Dundas Street
Edinburgh, EH3 6QG 0131
United Kingdom

Photos courtesy of the gallery

For Want of a Nail, the Golden Shoe was Lost is on view at Studio Orta – Les Moulins, Boissy-Le-Châtel

May 31 – July 5, 2026

For Want of a Nail, the Golden Shoe Was Lost evokes the world of folk tales in an exhibition dedicated to ceramics. Through new symbolist languages and the imagination of magical realism, the works are permeated by the ambiguity of a mystified world and its unsettling dries. They function like relics of the memory of our childhood tales, while at the same Ume slipping into troubling territories that subvert the familiarity of these stories.

Featuring works by Arina Antonova, Valeria Carrieri, Margot Darvogne, Clément Garcia, Alejandro Garcia Contreras, Roxanne Jackson, Margaux Laurens-Neel, Barbara Léon Leclerq, Lucile Littot, Antoine Moulinard, Emily Orta, Théo Ouaki, Robin Penalva, Héloïse Rival, and Rufina Ruiz Lopez.

Curated by Inès Carrazé and Emily Orta.

Is there a connection between ceramics and vulnerability? In For Want of a Nail, the Golden Shoe Was Lost, this relationship emerges almost naturally. Ceramics seem to be defined by a contradiction: they possess something enduring, mineral, almost timeless, while remaining deeply fragile. These works become vessels of memory, forms in which ancient tales, collective imaginaries, and childhood recollections intertwine. Like alchemy, transformed clay remains unstable, capable of preserving stories while allowing them to drift, evolve, and mutate over time. An ambiguous innocence.

The folklore of certain images from my childhood continues to haunt me. I wonder where they have gone. I summon creatures dancing around the moon, clouds pierced by profane animals, and fireflies shimmering in the darkness. I wonder whether the pragmatic realism of adulthood condemns us to abandon this sacred melancholy.

Since I began learning ceramics, the artists who inspire me have served as guiding lights in my practice. Their singular worlds fascinate me. This exhibition project offers a unique opportunity to come together and recognize ceramics as a contemporary medium nourished by vastly different languages, narratives, and sensibilities, depending on the artists who shape it. It is also a way of moving beyond the decorative and ornamental traditions that are still too often associated with ceramics. I have been discussing this idea with Inès for several years.

I set out in search of these mirages through the work of artists. They alone allow me to recover the fables that mass culture has exorcised. What remains of Symbolism? Of magical realism? Of shooting stars to gather after they have fallen to earth? It seems to me that the artist Emily speaks to me about attempting to answer these questions. They are storytellers of our contemporary curses, and within their narratives, the invocation of epic tales and imaginary characters becomes a safeguard against the powerlessness of everyday life.

In For Want of a Nail, the Golden Shoe Was Lost, folklore overflows into both the materiality and the iconography of the works. Together, they form a cosmography of popular tales across civilizations. Théo Ouaki’s primordial myths stand alongside Robin Penalva’s troglodytic worlds and Valeria Carrieri’s Mediterranean fantastical bestiary. Lucile Littot’s baroque relics of childhood flirt with the pagan kingdoms of Alejandro García Contreras. The subversion of feminine power explored by Margot Darvogne, Roxanne Jackson, and Margaux Laurens-Neel recalls the historically subordinate position assigned to women within modern Western narratives, while asserting the need to reawaken the chimerical powers they once embodied in Neolithic cultures. Antoine Moulinard likewise draws upon archaic magic, applying it to the spectrum of contemporary vernacular culture. Then there are Héloïse Rival’s mischievous fables, which naively adorn our daily lives, haunted by the malignant carcasses conjured by Barbara Léon Leclercq, or besieged by unsettling villains, the marginal figures embodied by Rufina Ruiz Lopez’s diablo mexicano and Clément Garcia’s masquerades. These disguised faces interrogate the archetypal figure of evil found in fables, transforming it into a raw sensibility in which menace becomes inseparable from fragility and vulnerability. Folkloric transmission belongs as much to the world of the living as to that of the dead, and it is by the light of the fire at night that the stories of funerary rites, sublimated by Arina Antonova, continue to circulate.

Although the figurative language of these works immerses us in distinct and situated worlds, they function less as literal narrations than as evocative forces that conjure enchanted imaginaries. Together, they form a constellation of dreamlike connections, restoring the vernacular function of the folktale; its liberating projections and its transgressive spaces. The transformation of oral storytelling into literary fairy tale during the eighteenth century gradually displaced this power, reducing it to a more normative and moralizing framework.

I realize that I am no longer simply seeking to dream or to escape. In this pursuit of the marvelous, I carry the banner of imagination in its struggle against the rationalizing forces of capitalist cultural industries. In this epic journey, magical creatures emerging from the earth guide me toward the eternal.

Perhaps, in our relentless desire to name what we see, we ultimately exhaust its possibilities. Some forms ask less to be understood than to be followed.

Text by Inès Carrazé & Emily Orta

Contact
cecile@studio-orta.com

Studio Orta – Les Moulins
48 rue des Papeteries
77169 Boissy-Le-Châtel
France

Installation views by Allison Borgo

Captions

• Alejandro Garcia Contreras, El Palacio de Asuka, 2024, High-temperature glazed ceramic. Photo: Antoine Vanoverschelde – HV Studio
• Antoine Moulinard, Portrait de l’artiste en nain de jardin, 2025, Grès émaillé, 135 × 40 × 35 cm. Photo: Ad Van Lisout
• Arina Antonova, Oyster Urn, 2026. Photo: Santino Lamorte. Courtesy of the artist
• Barbara Léon Leclercq, LIGNES, 2022-2025, Grès céramique émaillé, approx. 50/70 × 40 × 35 cm each. Photo: Théo Desmaizières
• Emily Orta, Rosamund, 2025, Glazed stoneware, 148 × 38 × 42 cm. Photo: Bertrand Huet
• Margot Darvogne, Guerillière du Love, 2025, Céramique, 35 × 23 × 20 cm
• Robin Penalva, Mélencol-lit2mort, 2023, Grès and acier, 140 × 54 × 14 cm
• Robin Penalva, GOMORA, 2025, Grès émaillé and étain, 55 × 36 × 51 cm
• Théo Ouaki, Be Water, 2023, Grès émaillé, 70 × 35 cm diameter
• Lucile Littot, Lucile In The Sky With Diamonds, 2021, Faïence, émail, and lustre or, 5 × 33 × 40 cm. Photo: the artist and Galeria Duarte Sequeira
• Roxanne Jackson, Candie, 2025, Ceramic, glaze, luster, and faux fur, 40 × 19 × 26 cm
• Clément Garcia, Selfmade ultime qui tient debout c’est pas facile (EXTRAIT), 2022-2023. Photo: Allison Borgo
• Valeria Carrieri, Storno – Tartaruga – Porcospino – Lumaca, 2026, Céramique émaillée, approx. 17 × 12 × 9 cm. Photo: Allison Borgo. Courtesy of the artist and Salemi Ceramics

Anina Major: Tender Seedlings is on view at Larkin Durey, London

June 5 – July 3, 2026

Larkin Durey is delighted to present Tender Seedlings, a collection of works presented for Anina Major’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.

Inspired by the poem Seedling by A. L. Major, the works consider how identity is formed through movement, memory, and transformation, as childhood nostalgia collides with adulthood realities and the self is shaped across distance from family, community, and country.

In establishing a home contrary to her birthplace, The Bahamas, Major is motivated to investigate the relationship between self and place as a condition of becoming rather than origin. Her practice reflects a diasporic understanding of identity – one formed through circulation, displacement, and adaptation – where cultural belonging is not fixed to a single location but carried forward through lived experiences. Using the traditional weaving technique, plaiting, taught to her by her late grandmother, Major translates a fragile, portable craft into ceramic form, allowing inherited knowledge to migrate across materials, geographies and time.

Her desire to fabricate her own terms of cultural identity and its defining influence, results in works that function as holders of cultural movement, where memory, labour, and imagination persist despite fracture. Tender Seedlings aligns material culture with Black Atlantic lineage and carries Black cosmology and metaphysics forward, proving that culture survives not only through nation or archive, but through embodied practices that travel. The work serves as an ongoing celebration and reclamation, positioning craft as a vital cultural infrastructure through which identity, resilience, and continuity are sustained and offering a nuanced reflection on inheritance and belonging.

Major holds an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design. She is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies, including being a 2026 USA Fellow, finalist in the 2025 Loewe Craft Prize, winner of the Armory Show 2024 Pommery Prize, the 2023 Joan Mitchell Fellowship and the EKWC, Centre-of-excellence for ceramics international artist-in-residency. Major’s work has been exhibited in The Bahamas, Europe and across the United States, with a permanent display at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC.

Her work is included in permanent collections of the National Gallery of The Bahamas, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Carnegie Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design Museum, the Perez Art Museum of Miami, York Art Gallery and Detroit Institute of Arts Museum, among others. Her work has also been featured in the New York Times, Forbes magazine and published in Phaidon Press Great Women Sculptors.

Contact
gallery@larkindurey.com

Larkin Durey
13 Mason’s Yard
London SW1Y 6BU
United Kingdom

Images Copyright The Artist; Courtesy Larkin Durey. Individual works photographed by Andrew T. White

Captions

• Anina Major, Dream Holder, 2026, Glazed stoneware, sea glass, salt, 14 x 20 x 22 in / 35.6 x 50.8 x 55.9 cm
• Anina Major, Flower Bowl, 2026, Soda-fired glazed stoneware, sea glass, 17 x 17 x 15 in / 43.2 x 43.2 x 38.1 cm
• Anina Major, Memory Holder, 2025, Glazed stoneware, luster, 15 x 20 x 17 in / 38.1 x 50.8 x 43.2 cm
• Anina Major, Pigeon Plum Ripe, 2026, Glazed stoneware, sea glass, sand, 11 x 10 x 10 in / 27.9 x 25.4 x 25.4 cm
• Anina Major, The Flower, 2026, Glazed stoneware, sea glass, luster, 17 x 17 x 16 in / 43.2 x 43.2 x 40.6 cm
• Anina Major, The Seed, 2026, Soda-fired glazed stoneware, 9 x 13 x 7 1/2 in / 22.9 x 33 x 19.1 cm

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 wooden furniture and Scandinavian ambiance feel distant as you observe the spades and buckets scattered up the driveway.

The evening pottery class, which eventually had turned into three, was addictive. You couldn’t get enough. There was no space at home, your partner was not keen on bringing dirt inside, and the place in Hackney only allowed a few items to be fired a month. You needed somewhere to branch out.

You emailed a few studios, all full. The yummy mummies and professionals had taken those places. This was the last one, but the studio manager insisted you meet in person. You knock on the door and take a last peek at the poorly written directions in the email. Hopefully this isn’t the fifth wrong door today.

door swings open

Oh hello! Welcome to the studio!

I’m glad you made it.
We spoke online. You’re looking for a place, right?

you nod

Please come in.

ushers you inside

The Kitchen

This is the kitchen, I thought we could start the tour here.

Please have a seat.

Would you like a cup of tea? I’ve only got Lipton.

Ah yes, I thought you might.

kettle begins boiling

Do you take milk? Unlike the leaves, I’ve got all different kinds: almond, oat, cow, coconut, soy, rice. You name it, I got it.

Oh! But before you choose, let me ask you something whilst we wait for the kettle to boil.

kettle continues to boil

Have you ever thought about how your choice of milk makes the tea taste different?

Yes, I know it sounds like a daft question. I mean, how do we pick our milk? How do we know how much milk we want? How do our choices affect the taste of our tea?

Bear with me.

For instance, on rainy days when the milk is running low, I will use much less milk than ideal to squeeze out enough cups for the day. The taste isn’t fantastic, it could be much better. However, it’s fine because I know I can drink tea with milk all day (albeit, much less). Not an ideal solution, but better than venturing out to the shops in the rain.

Sometimes I choose to use a certain type of milk because of past experiences. I once had a friend who treated me to a delicious peppermint tea with almond milk. Now I always pair peppermint tea with almond milk and enjoy every sip of it.

Once I had a friend who was vegan and got served tea with cowmilk by mistake. She spat and swore, screaming “This is sooo dank and slimy! Cow milk! Disgusting!”. She set the drink aside and muttered to herself to never come back to this “no good, overpriced, bad excuse for a café”.

What I’m trying to get at is; your choice of milk alters your experience of the tea. Your choice is a product of past and present circumstances. Whether it be the weather, a fond memory of a friend’s gesture or a moral dietary decision. Your experience is the result of you interacting with the ingredients, ranging from pleasant sips to angry exclamations.

I think about this quite a bit. Not always in terms of tea. But more about how our individual understanding and choice of materials affect what we make and how we interact with it. What affects my material choice? To what extent do my materials influence what and how I choose to make ceramics?

Let’s think about how this may play out in the studio.

Much like how our individual choice of milk affects our experience with tea drinking, our choice of ceramic materials affects what, how and why we make ceramics. For instance, some makers in here argue that our present use of industry developed materials is influencing ceramic making, creating homogenous and predetermined ceramic expressions.

You see, “For hundreds of years generations of potters used the materials close to home and experimented with the idiosyncrasies of local materials, leading to a rich diversity of regional styles and techniques. Although commercial production has now brought a certain uniformity to the material available.” (Sentance 2004, p. 26). This uniform material is developed primarily by and for industrial ceramics. Nevertheless, most present-day ceramicists work with this ready-to-use clay and glaze, and unlike their ancestral colleagues, they have little to no knowledge of the material’s basic ingredients (Forrest 2013, p.10). Instead, the material supplier informs the maker of the ready-to-use clay’s expected properties and applications.

For example, on material supplier Cebex’s website they inform the buyer that Porcelain Clay CS970 White “is easy to throw and has good transparency. […] When throwing, the clay is smooth, comfortable and pliable.” (Cebex Keramikexperterna AB 2024). Before we touch the clay Cebex has briefed us on how we ought to work with the material and what qualities we should be looking for. This description can be helpful, however it’s important to note that it’s shaped by industrial values. Porcelain Clay CS970 White is a good and easy throwing clay for creating the forms and expressions implied by industry.

However, what about the characteristics which are not sought after by industry? What about warping and cracks? What about unexpected violent behaviour on the wheel? What about a rugged surface? What about uneven colour? What about not throwing vessels? These features are not easily created with a “good throwing clay” as the material doesn’t lend to those expressions. A “good throwing clay” much easier becomes objects with thin walls, objects which centre well, objects which are sensitive to the makers touch, objects which are white, objects which pair well with most ready-to-buy surface glazes. Consequently, you might question to what extent the qualities of industry-developed materials influence what and how we make?

I have some pictures on the fridge which I would like to show you.

points to pictures on fridge

These works are created by ceramic designer Emma Lacey, artist Edmund de Waal, and potter Linda Bloomfield. Although they come from different backgrounds and occupations, they are brought together by a shared visual language: thin, lightly coloured thrown forms marked by a dimple. Why do these works appear so similar? To what extent is their making influenced by material choice, and by the narratives of the ceramic industry itself?

On the other hand, are these practitioners making informed decisions regardless of the material? Or are they choosing the material because they desire this expression?

Even so, where do these decisions come from and how do our practitioners relate to the key player, the material?

kettle stops boiling

Oh, the water is ready. What milk do you want?

No milk? You sure?

Ok, let’s move on. Feel free to take your cup with you.

The Studio

So, this is the main studio space.

As you see there’s a lot of light, plenty of space, a couple of wheels, kilns, slab roller, plaster room. I’ve even got my own desk. Well, everyone does.

Ah that?

That´s our noticeboard. People put up flyers for exhibitions, open calls, grants, all sorts.

Oh, yes, the big glaring text? Those are the rules and advice here in the ceramic world. They aren’t official, but they have been passed down from teacher to student for generations, so they are hard to ignore. And they can be helpful. Like these ones.

points to text

DO NOT SAND BONE DRY CLAY!

Close the door to the kiln room as much as possible.

They relate to health and safety. I’m not a big fan of contracting silicosis or dying from carbon monoxide poisoning.

But there are some rules which I think you can take with a pinch of salt. Like this one.

points to text

Do NOT mix earthenware & stoneware clays.

I think it’s a bit misleading. You see, earthenware and stoneware do not exist. Don’t get me wrong, the terms earthenware and stoneware do exist, most ceramicists use them all the time. But that’s what they are, widely used terms, terms which simplify the reality of materials. Online source Pottery Crafters describes the terms as “The main difference between Stoneware and Earthenware is the firing temperature. Stoneware clay can be fired at temperatures up to (1,285°C) Cone 10, while Earthenware clay is fired at lower temperatures around (1,063°C) Cone 04.” (Pottery Crafters 2022).

These terms are useful for determining at what temperature a clay achieves a durable and stable body, which is standard and desirable when creating functional ceramic ware. However, the terms earthenware and stoneware limit our understanding of clay and its behaviour at different temperatures. The truth is not as simple as stoneware clay fires to 1285°C and earthenware clay to 1063°C. Clays can be fired to any temperature, 2000°C, 1000°C or even 50°C. However, depending on the ingredients in the clay, the clay responds differently to the temperatures. I have some samples here that we can look at.

places hand in trouser pocket and pulls out two objects

Look at this brown and bubbly sludge.

This clay has a lot of flux in it and would normally be classified as an earthenware clay. I have fired it to 1200°C. As you see it has boiled and become more fluid, I think it resembles a glaze.

On the other hand, let’s have look at this crisp white sample.

This is a clay which is classified as a stoneware clay. I have fired it to the same temperature as the other sample, 1200°C. As you can see the body is brittle and flaky, it does not contain nearly as much flux as the other clay.

A few makers in here don’t think of ceramic materials in the terms of earthenware and stoneware because they want to explore the qualities beyond their expected temperature. Let’s find their desks so I can show you what I mean.

wanders over to a desk in the corner of the room

Ah, look here!

This is Brown’s work. By challenging the terms stoneware and earthenware he unlocks different qualities, expressions and roles for ceramic materials. As we can see here, he doesn’t limit glaze to surface, he lets it act as the body of the piece.

moves over to another desk

And over here we have some of Kuwata’s work.

As you see here, clay doesn’t always have to be a static body which you dress in glaze, it can be dynamic, unpredictable, swell and push on other materials.

Isn’t it exciting?

walks over to the noticeboard again

Another rule which I wouldn’t think too much about is this one.

points to text

Do NOT fire plaster with clay, it will EXPLODE!

It’s not as dramatic as it sounds. “The issue is lime popping, calcium sulphate particles in the plaster slowly absorb water from the air in the kiln. If these particles are inside a clay body, they expand, but the clay around shrinks. This causes tension and can lead to cracks, popping and breakage.” (bciskepottery 2011). But it doesn’t always make the pottery break, or as stated, explode.

However, if you fire plaster with clay to high enough temperatures it turns into a light-green sludge with hints of brown. I have a sample here in my pocket.

takes out sample from pocket

If I would have followed this rule, this object here and the knowledge it gives me wouldn’t exist.

Not all ceramicists agree with me when it comes to questioning rules and advice. I mean, the notes have been put up for a reason. Still, I think it’s essential to keep asking questions if ceramic art and craft are to continue developing. This includes questioning the expectations that shape how we make ceramics. Come, I can show you what I mean.

takes you further into the studio space

I think Keith Harrison’s “Last supper” is here somewhere.

Yes, there, look!

Harrison has embedded conductive wire in the raw clay body and is running a current through it.

clay body pops

See, that’s the clay being fired. We are witnessing a performative firing. The firing isn’t merely a process for creating ceramics, Harrison is making the action an artistic piece.

And have a look over here.

moves over to yet another desk

Look here. Ceramicist Malin Uhlén has coated kiln elements in glaze, using them as a sculptural body rather than as a structural part of the kiln. She’s giving the material an artistic role rather than a practical one.

Oh, and look over here!

drags you along to yet another desk

This is a platter made by a follower of Bernard Palissy, a 16th Century renaissance man. Work in the spirit of Palissy is not for the faint-hearted. You see the snake, it’s created through life-casting. This technique is uncommon today, given that we now have a different view of what’s right and wrong when it comes to using animals in artistic practices. But this work breaks our contemporary expectations of how a ceramic maker can operate and it produces unique pieces.

you arrive at an empty desk

The rules and advice of the ceramic world, as well as our relationship to materials, inevitably shape how we understand what ceramics is and can be. However, the work in this studio shows what can happen when some rules are broken. As you can imagine, questioning widely accepted knowledge is a path full of tension and raised eyebrows, but an exciting one where we uncover unexplored territories, expressions and insights. After all, isn’t that what creative making is all about?

Anyhow! I’m such a blabbermouth!

I’m sure you have some opinions on the matters yourself.

This is your desk.

gestures to the empty desk deep in the studio

Do you want it?

Alice Fyles (b. 1996, Limerick, Ireland, raised in Norrtälje, Sweden) is a ceramic artist and researcher based in the United Kingdom. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Ceramic Design from Central St. Martins and a MFA in Ceramics and Glass from Konstfack. Fyles’ practice explores the origins, nature and relationships of ceramic materials. Her work involves foraging geological materials, extensive material experimentation, and documentation using objects, text and photography.

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Reference List

• bciskepottery (2011) Why is plaster the enemy of clay? Ceramic Arts Network Community Forum. Available at: https://community.ceramicartsdaily.org/topic/1517-why-is-plaster-the-enemy-of-clay/ (Accessed: 18 January 2024).
• Cebex Keramikexperterna AB (2024) Porcelain clay CS970 white 12.5 kg. Available at: https://www.cebex.se/porslinsleracs970125kg-p-859.html?language=en&cPath=60_59_190 (Accessed: 18 January 2024).
• Forrest, M. (2013) Natural glazes: collecting and making. Great Britain: Herbert Press.
• Pottery Crafters (2022) What is the difference between stoneware and earthenware clay. Available at: https://potterycrafters.com/what-is-the-difference-between-stoneware-and-earthenware-clay/ (Accessed: 18 January 2024).
• Sentance, B. (2004) Ceramics: a world guide to traditional techniques. London: Thames & Hudson.

Captions

• Image 1: Everyday Milk Jug (Emma Lacey 2017). Photograph by Fiona Reid (2017). © Emma Lacey (artwork); © Fiona Reid (photograph).
• Image 2: Teapot (Edmund de Waal 1997). Courtesy of the artist © Edmund de Waal.
• Image 3: Handmade dimpled cup (Linda Bloomfield 2023). Courtesy of the artist and Goldfinger © Linda Bloomfield.
• Image 4: Ljung 1200 °C (Alice Fyles 2023). © Alice Fyles.
• Image 5: White flake 1200°C (Alice Fyles 2024). © Alice Fyles.
• Image 6: Glaze Tower (Cory Brown 2021). Courtesy of the artist © Cory Brown.
• Image 7: Untitled (Takuro Kuwata 2021). Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94 © Takuro Kuwata.
• Image 8: Plaster and Ljung 1260°C (Alice Fyles 2023). © Alice Fyles.
• Image 9: Last Supper (Keith Harrison 2006). Courtesy of the artist © Keith Harrison.
• Image 10: Metallexperiment (Malin Uhlén 2023). Courtesy of the artist © Malin Uhlén.
• Image 11: Platter (Follower of Bernard Palissy 1510–1590). Courtesy of the Met’s Open Access Policy.

Image References

• Bloomfield, L. (2023) Handmade dimpled cup [Ceramic]. Available at: https://www.goldfinger.design/products/linda-bloomfield-handmade-dimpled-cups (Accessed: 19 January 2024).
• Brown, C. (2021) Glaze Tower [Ceramic]. Available at: https://www.instagram.com/p/CTYBOuvLst4/ (Accessed: 19 January 2024).
• De Waal, E. (1997) Teapot [Ceramic]. Available at: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Porcelain_teapot.jpg (Accessed: 3 February 2026).
• Follower of B. Palissy (1510–1590) Platter [Ceramic, lead-glazed earthenware]. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
• Fyles, A. (2023) Ljung 1200°C [Ceramic]. Unpublished work. Photograph by the author.
• Fyles, A. (2024) White flake 1200°C [Ceramic]. Unpublished work. Photograph by the author.
• Fyles, A. (2023) Plaster and Ljung 1260°C [Ceramic]. Unpublished work. Photograph by the author.
• Harrison, K. (2006) Last Supper [Ceramic performance]. Available at: http://www.keith-harrison.info/works/lastsupper.html (Accessed: 19 January 2024).
• Kuwata, T. (2021) Untitled [Ceramic]. Available at: https://salon94.com/artists/takuro-kuwata/artworks/untitled-TK593 (Accessed: 3 February 2026).
• Reid, F. (2017) Photograph of Everyday Milk Jug by E. Lacey. Unpublished photograph. Used with permission.
• Uhlén, M. (2023) Metallexperiment [Ceramic]. Unpublished work. Supplied by the artist.

Shinhye You is a ceramic artist born in South Korea in 1993 and currently based in London. Shinhye’s connection with clay began in 2013 at Kookmin University in South Korea, where she earned her BA and MA in ceramics. She has been based in London since completing her MA in Ceramics & Glass at the Royal College of Art in 2023.

Her works have been featured internationally, including at the Aveiro Ceramic Biennale, Ceramic Art Andenne, the International Ceramic Biennale in Siegburg, Ceramic Art London, and more.

Working across ceramics, writing, and installation, Shinhye develops written fiction rooted in magical realism, which she translates into visual forms with clay as her primary medium. Her ceramic works are tangible remnants of imagined worlds, suggesting traces of human lives and magical creatures that once existed. Appearing after the death of their fictional inhabitants, these works stand as empty vessels and fragments of a lost existence.

Through these pieces, Shinhye explores the afterlife of once-living beings, as well as the residue of fragile human presence and vanished beliefs. While her works originate from imagined narratives, they are also informed by personal experiences, memories, and emotions. Through these fictional worlds, she reflects on loss, longing, displacement, and fragility.

Her sculptures often carry a sense of melancholy and quiet beauty, offering traces of lives that can no longer be fully observed or recovered. Rather than presenting complete stories, they reveal fragments and remains through which viewers may connect with their own memories, griefs, and desires.

Visit Shinhye You’s website and Instagram page.

Featured work

Selected works, 2025-2026