Posted on March 30, 2026

The Digital Media and Visual Arts Department at Frostburg State University invites applications for a tenure-track assistant professor position in studio art with expertise in sculpture and ceramics. Candidates should demonstrate a strong interdisciplinary creative practice and the ability to teach a broad range of approaches, including 3D Foundations. We are committed to fostering an inclusive and conceptually rich studio environment and seek a dynamic artist-educator who will contribute significantly to our undergraduate curriculum, mentorship, and creative activity. This position is available to begin in Fall 2026 for the main campus in Frostburg, Maryland. Salary is competitive and commensurate with experience and qualifications. University System of Maryland benefits package included.

Responsibilities: The successful candidate will teach introductory and advanced courses in ceramics and sculpture, with the possibility of additional assignments such as Senior Portfolio, Art Appreciation, and 3-D Design, and will have the potential to develop courses in their area of expertise. Advising and mentoring students is performed by all faculty. The successful candidate will oversee multiple studio areas and a range of equipment, including a woodshop and ceramics studio and kilns. Duties will also include professional development activities, and service to the Department, College, University, and community.

Minimum Qualifications:
• MFA in ceramics, sculpture, or closely related field.
• Experience teaching in higher education.
• A background in multiple three-dimensional media.
• Experience with operating all facets of a ceramics studio, including kilns and glaze chemistry.
• Experience with operating all facets of a sculpture studio, including woodshop, metal fabrication, mold-making and casting materials (latex, paper, plaster).

Preferred Qualifications:
• Significant experience teaching a range of studio art courses in a higher education setting.
• Strong record of creative practice in at least one of the teaching fields.
• Demonstrated competencies in a variety of teaching methodologies and/or pedagogical approaches that reach a broad range of learners.
• Experience and familiarity with a learning management system (LMS) such as Brightspace, Blackboard, or Canvas.

About the University: A member institution of the University System of Maryland, Frostburg State University is a public, comprehensive, largely residential regional university offering programs in the sciences, education, business, the arts and humanities at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. FSU prides itself on being a dynamic, learning-centered institution that emphasizes teaching with opportunities for professional development and research. More than 4,000 students enroll yearly.

About the Area: FSU is located on a scenic 260-acre campus in the mountains of Western Maryland, a region rich in history, quaint shopping areas and eclectic cafes and food choices. The Western Maryland region is considered a four-season outdoor hub of recreational experiences offering activities such as hiking, mountain biking, water sports, snow skiing/boarding, golfing, climbing, etc. Frostburg offers a family-friendly college town feel with easy access to major cities like Pittsburgh, Washington, DC, and Baltimore. If you are looking for insightful colleagues, energetic students, and a great place to work and call home in a region with unlimited adventure seeking opportunities, FSU is for you!

Apply: Along with your application, please provide the following: 1) curriculum vitae; 2) a cover letter specifically addressing the requirements in this advertisement; 3) statement on teaching philosophy; 4) contact information for three professional references; 5) portfolio of candidate and candidate’s student’s work, and 6) unofficial transcripts of your graduate work.

For assurance of full consideration, please submit materials by 04/23/26.

This position is open until filled.

FSU is proud to be a diverse and inclusive multicultural university.

Frostburg State University welcomes and encourages women, veterans and minorities to apply and seeks to recruit and retain a diverse workforce. FSU is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Appropriate auxiliary aids and services for
qualified individuals with disabilities will be provided upon request. Please notify us in advance.

The New Taipei City Yingge Ceramics Museum (Taiwan) invites ceramic artists from around the world to apply for the 2027 Taiwan Ceramics Residency Program, offering 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 are open for the Resident Artist Program at The Clay Studio (Philadelphia), offering early-career ceramic artists the opportunity to develop their practice within a dynamic community setting. The program provides free studio space for up to three years, a $250 monthly stipend, exhibition opportunities, and professional support. Open to US and international artists, the residency emphasizes community engagement, teaching, and collaboration. The next cohort begins September 1, 2026, and applications are due April 13, 2026.

A-B Projects will host State of Ceramics: The Power of Decoration – Rethinking Hierarchies, a two-part online conversation led by ceramic artist Anthony Sonnenberg on April 4 and April 11, 2026. The program explores how decoration—often historically marginalized in ceramics—can be reconsidered as a powerful cultural and political tool within contemporary practice. The first session features a lecture and Q&A, followed by a participatory discussion the following week. The events are free and open to the public, with registration required.

Ceramics Now is happy to share a new partnership with the Alfred Ceramic Art Museum. Through their Supporting Member tier, you can now receive a free one-year subscription to Ceramics Now, alongside a range of museum benefits, including access to the North American Reciprocal Museum (NARM) network. For around $10/month, your membership supports exhibitions, education, and the care of an important ceramic collection, while keeping you connected to the global contemporary ceramics scene. It’s a meaningful way to support both organizations.

Applications are open for the 62nd International Ceramic Sculptural Symposium in Bolesławiec (Poland), taking place July 27 – August 21, 2026. Organized by the Bolesławiec Cultural Centre, the symposium will bring together artists from Poland and abroad to develop projects using local materials and factory facilities. This year’s theme, Sublime, invites reflections on transformation, materiality, and the unpredictability of working with clay and fire. Applications are open until April 17, 2026. The translation button is in the top right corner.

The Wayne Art Center invites submissions for CraftForms 2026, the 31st International Juried Exhibition of Contemporary Fine Craft, presented by the Wayne Art Center (US). Open to artists working across disciplines, including ceramics, fiber, glass, metal, and mixed media, the exhibition will take place from December 5, 2026, to January 23, 2027. Juried by Robert K. Liu and Patrick Benesh-Liu, the exhibition will award over $12,000 in prizes. Submissions are due September 9, 2026, with an entry fee of $50.

Mid-career ceramic artists are invited to apply for the McKnight Residency for Ceramic Artists at Northern Clay Center (US), a three-month residency supporting the development of new work and professional exchange. Up to three artists will be selected for residencies taking place in 2027, each receiving a $6,000 award, free studio space, and firing support. The program culminates in a group exhibition and catalogue, with a touring component. Applications close May 15, 2026.

Exhibitions

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

• Out of the Blue: Heidi Bjørgan and Kari Dyrdal at Taste Contemporary, Geneva
• Janny Baek: Life Forms at Joy Machine, Chicago
• Toshiaki Noda: (re)(de)constructing at Alison Bradley Projects, New York
• Dual Florescence: YehRim Lee and Chase Travaille at LaiSun Keane, Boston
• Janet Abrams: Balancing Acts at Zane Bennett Contemporary Art, Santa Fe
• « 10 » Ten Years of The Residency Program at Galerie Lefebvre & Fils, Paris

What’s on View

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

1. Chenlu Hou and Chiara No: What the Hands Remember to Hear at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT
2. Break the Mould at IKON Gallery, Birmingham
3. Jennifer King: Persistence of Vision at The Pit, Los Angeles
4. Yakimono: A Culture of Exchange – The Impact of Japanese Ceramics at Messums West, Tisbury
5. Bachelot & Caron: Porcelaine et faits divers at Musée d’art à Charleroi, Charleroi
6. Ted Secombe: Language of Glaze at Sabbia Gallery, Sydney
7. AIR 2026: Compulsion at AMOCA – American Museum of Ceramic Art, Pomona, CA
8. Kevin Umaña: Sanguine and Spiraling at Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York
9. Jennifer McCandless: You’re An Animal at Soapbox Arts, Burlington
10. Antonio Marras: Caos Calmo at Carpenters Workshop Gallery, London

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Featured image – Chenlu Hou and Chiara No: What the Hands Remember to Hear (installation view), The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, January 25 to May 25, 2026. Chenlu Hou: Courtesy of the artist and Kristen Lorello, NY. Chiara No: Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Olympia Shannon

Jeanne Rimbert is a visual artist/ceramist born in Paris in 1985. After completing a DNAP (Diploma of Advanced Studies in Art) at the Beaux-Arts in Rueil-Malmaison, followed by a Master’s degree in graphic arts, her work has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including solo exhibitions at Galerie Premier Regard and Galerie du Haut Pavé in Paris, as well as at the Musée Ariana in Geneva.

Rimbert has participated in exhibitions at institutions and venues such as the Centre d’art contemporain Aponia, Eglise Saint Merry, and the Bastille Design Center in Paris, as well as in international projects in Italy and Belgium. She has taken part in major events and festivals, including the Biennale de céramique contemporaine in Vallauris, Ceramic Art Andenne, and Salon Révélations at the Grand Palais in Paris.

The interior spaces and exterior landscapes she encounters, through chance discoveries, are the triggers for her installation work. Sculpture thus becomes a way of fossilising an imaginary moment within a physical reality.
Using earthenware or stoneware, the artist questions the place of ceramics in contemporary art. Clay becomes in turn painting, sculpture, installation, architecture or even performance.

Jeanne Rimbert deconstructs and reconstructs composite visions and fragments, thus modelling new landscapes. New universes that oscillate between the memory of what has been and the hope of what will be.

Visit Jeanne Rimbert’s website and Instagram page.

Featured work

Sea & Sky, 2024-2025

The fallen bodies land & The Banquet, 2023-2024

Wonderfull days!, 2022-2023

The sea will keep our memories

What might look like stalagmites emerge from the ground, reassuring symbols of an unchanging earthly anchorage.

They are a mass of fused materials: cracked like arid earth, flowing like water, frothy like foam, cottony like clouds. But don’t be fooled by appearances. Like a forest of masts in the middle of the ocean, my little blue and white boats will take their passengers either to a better future, or to shipwreck and oblivion.

Driven by the promise of a better future, they seek the sun towards a bluer tomorrow. On the black sea, under the white clouds. At the edge of the known world, where “the land and the sea hang together” ¹

The sails, made from worn clothing sewn together, are objects of memory, repositories of their owners’ lives. They are a constant reminder of human tragedies and the fleeting nature of our life plans.

The threads woven between the masts are like the ropes that hoist the sails. They make and break bonds, tie life together, untie life. They repair sails and pierce hearts.

(1) About the ocean, Pythéas de Marseille, 4th century BC

The sky will keep our memories

This display of abstract forms hangs on the wall like so many little clouds. Calling to the invisible, they inspire melancholy in the face of the transience of all things, inviting to contemplation as much as quest.

These sky-coloured amulets are surrounded by the cottony remnants of some childish reverie, whose white nebulae speckled with hope are gradually cracking.

Driven by a meditative process imbued with vulnerability and naivety, I tirelessly weave links of cotton, wool and metal around my grigris, using the lace scraps that my grandmother kept in her sewing box. Symbols of trust lost and regained, they ward off fate and heal wounds.

The knotting or wrapping that I do, both binding and holding, evokes a kind of ritual that transforms the material into an object with meaning and value.

The fallen bodies land

The fallen bodies land is a protean place where ceramics and salvaged objects meet in digressions that are at once architectural, carnal and religious.
Precarious flesh that builds, scaffolding phallic towers with dripping tops, fighting against the threat of a foretold expiration. Baroque architecture with an organic quiver. The materials argue and the colours cry out the neurosis of bodies wandering in this contemporary vanity that is as attractive as it is repulsive.

As an imperfect blend of art brut and popculture, of fanciful and even fantastical grafts of figures, icons and totems, the installation asserts a vulnerability that is imbued with naivety in the choice of forms and media, selected for their physical and symbolic qualities, and is in keeping with a definition of contemporary art as precarious.

This strange carnival invites the viewer to plunge into a universe where the sacred and the profane meet, creating a heterogeneous aesthetic that unabashedly blends the unbridled cruelty of Elizabethan theatre, the learned classicism of still life painting, the primitive magic of voodoo and the new icons of our over-consuming society.

The banquet

The banquet is an installation that invites us to sit down at the table, somewhere between mythological narrative and cannibalistic appetite.
Like its big sister The fallen bodies land, the banquet is an imperfect blend of art brut, pop culture and Elizabethan theatre; a ritual celebration with an organic thrill.

Composed of fanciful, even fantastical grafts between body parts (Titus Andronicus), voodoo (black virgin, string doll) and vanity, the installation exposes our turpitudes, calling on the sacred to fight against the threat of an impending expiry.

Captions

• The fallen bodies land – Piggy Bad Sow, 2023, glazed stoneware, 133×40 cm
• The fallen bodies land – installation, 2023, glazed stoneware, trashes, 144×250 cm
• The fallen bodies land – Worries, Amphora and Dead Apple, 2023, glazed stoneware, trashes, 100×180 cm
• The fallen bodies land – Dead Pirate Tower, 2023, glazed stoneware, 146×44 cm
• The Banquet, Table Installation – Masks, vase, red virgins, 2024, glazed stoneware, threads, 45x80x30 cm
• The Banquet, Ghost Hoodie, 2024, glazed earthenware, 14×19 cm
• The Banquet, Hanged Heads, 2024, waxed earthenware, 10×10 cm
• The Banquet, Small Hand, 2024, glazed earthenware, 14×9 cm
• The Banquet, Melted Apple, 2024, glazed stoneware, 17x20x20 cm
• The Banquet, Red Virgin, 2024, glazed stoneware, threads, 45x20x20 cm

Jeanne Rimbert: Wonderfull days!¹, 2022-2023

There, now, everything, right away. It’s pop, it’s fluorescent, it’s fun. Dynamic, joyful, pink-green-blue. Magical colours and graphic effervescence. It’s like the Mickey Mouse drawing we had at the bottom of our plastic plate. Since then, we’ve applied layers of lacquer to give the surface a shiny finish. But the tree has no more leaves, the bird is stuck in its oil puddle, the rabbit doesn’t look right. Let’s put some glitter and shine back on.

Mankind has become sufficiently alienated from itself to be able to experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the highest order.

(1) Samuel Beckett, Wonderfull days!

Captions

Wonderfull Days!, installation at Ariana Museum, 2022-2023, glazed earthenware, variable dimensions

Japheth Asiedu-Kwarteng is an artist and educator based in Edinburg, Texas, where he leads the ceramics program at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Edinburg campus. He holds an MFA in Ceramics from Illinois State University, USA, and a B.A. in Industrial Art (Ceramics) from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Ghana.

Japheth has exhibited widely both locally and internationally in esteemed institutions such as the Art Museum of Southeast Texas (Beaumont, Texas), Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (Salt Lake City, Utah), Crocker Art Museum (Sacramento, California), University Galleries (Normal, Illinois), and DAAP Galleries (Cincinnati, Ohio). His works are part of the permanent collection at University Galleries and in private collections across the United States.

His artistic practice honors the legacy of Ghanaian ceramic history and its contemporary presence, drawing on complex cultural symbols with a spirit of openness and innovation. With over a decade of experience working with his favorite medium – clay – and a deep commitment to teaching, Japheth brings both technical skill and cultural sensitivity to the classroom and studio. Before moving to the United States for graduate studies, he served as a teaching technician at KNUST, Ghana. There, he was responsible for kiln and studio equipment maintenance, as well as sourcing and processing wild clay and glaze materials for the ceramics program. He has worked with and learned from notable ceramics professors, including Parpah Senanu Kwawukume and Jeannie Hulen, and contributed to research into the production of electrical porcelain, tile cement, and crucibles using wild clay and locally sourced materials.

Japheth is passionate about community engagement. In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, he joined a group of graduate students and an art history professor from Illinois State University to organize At the Table – a series of virtual dinners and conversations designed to foster community and vulnerability in a time of global isolation. The group developed discussion themes, recipes, and ceramic bowls, creating a space for empathy, camaraderie, and shared experience across different backgrounds.

Japheth is an elected member of the International Academy of Ceramics and has served as Fellowship Coordinator on the Artaxis Board. He also contributed to NCECA through its Collaboration and Engagement Committee, reflecting his active role in shaping the future of ceramics through education, advocacy, and community. He graduated as Valedictorian from the Wonsook Kim College of Fine Arts at Illinois State University.

Visit Japheth Asiedu-Kwarteng’s website and Instagram page.

Featured work

Selected works, 2020-2025

Japheth Asiedu-Kwarteng: Selected works, 2020-2025

My work engages with the profound legacy of Ghanaian ceramics, bridging its rich historical foundations with a bold contemporary vision. Drawing upon the intricate symbolism of Kente patterns in textiles and Adinkra motifs, I transform these culturally significant elements into a visual language that challenges traditional boundaries and redefines ceramic art on an international stage. By navigating the intersections of form, symbolism, and materiality, my practice interrogates the tensions between tradition and modernity, cultural preservation and innovation, as well as the dynamic exchanges that occur within and across cultures.

At its core, my research delves into the concept of space—both physical and metaphysical—as a lens for exploring transitions through borders, identities, and emotional terrains. My work functions as a monumental visual diary, chronicling experiences of navigating spaces that evoke a spectrum of emotions: loss, belonging, acceptance, isolation, and nostalgia. This diary embodies the universal human experience of crossing thresholds—whether geographic, cultural, or personal—and reflects my commitment to creating art that resonates across different contexts.

Through my practice, I seek to address profound questions. For instance,
• How do the spaces we traverse shape our perceptions of identity (not as black or white, African or western, but as the self), belonging, and existence?
• In what ways do transitions impact on our mental and psychological well-being?
• How can art serve as a catalyst for community engagement, fostering social cohesion across diverse contexts?

These inquiries are not merely theoretical, they are deeply personal. My body of work reflects the transformative journey of, for instance, parenthood, examining how this space of nurturing has reshaped my understanding of care, identity, and legacy.

I aim to spark dialogue around the universality of human experience while celebrating the specificity of cultural heritage. My work transcends traditional definitions of ceramics, incorporating innovative techniques and interdisciplinary approaches to amplify its relevance within the contemporary art landscape. By blending monumental forms, evocative symbolism, and rich cultural narratives, I contribute to a global discourse on the self, resilience, and the ways in which art can be a bridge to foster understanding across borders.

As an artist-scholar, I am committed to pushing the boundaries of ceramic art, championing its role in contemporary art, and fostering a deeper appreciation of cultural intersections. My work stands as a testament to the enduring power of art to connect, challenge, and inspire.

My work is predominantly ceramic freestanding and wall sculptures and installations that incorporate fabric (notably Kente), repurposed wood, metal and several other nonceramic materials and media. They are characterized by vibrant underglazes, slips, and manganese dioxide finishes in both oxidation and atmospheric firing techniques, particularly soda firing, to create surfaces that resonate with texture and depth.

I have been fascinated by how many Ghanaian ceramic artists such as James Kwame Amoah, Kofi Asante, Frederick Okai and many others have used and continue to use Ghanaian symbolism, like Adinkra, in many fascinating ways; and how artist like Piet Mondrian, Kurt Shwitters, Joel Shapiro, Faith Ringgold and Karel Appel render abstractionism and repurposed materials. I strive to create an aura through which multiple symbols of social significance coexist within space and time in my work. I am drawn to the dominance of mostly primary colors in the paintings of Piet Mondrian. His bold and block color composition resonates with the bold and vibrant colors of the Kente. I am interested in exploring the intersection between the abstraction of Piet Mondrian and Joel Shapiro and my style abstraction.

My sculptures incorporate fabric alongside industrial materials and tools—such as pallets, worn out kiln parts (including kiln elements, thermocouples, relays, cones), used saw blades, and other remnants of labor and production. These works vary in scale, from small pieces to expansive installations, and are presented as freestanding, hanging, or wall-mounted forms. I am particularly interested in surface treatments using underglazes and manganese dioxide, which allow me to explore contrasts between material histories, process, and aesthetic finish.

Captions

• Dining with Mama & Dada: Blood, 2025, porcelain, mason stain, underglaze, 20 x 13.5 x 13.5 inches, Oxidation fired. Photo credit: Artist
• Dining with Mama & Dada: Golden, 2025, porcelain, stained porcelain, underglaze, 20 x 15 x 15 inches, Oxidation fired. Photo credit: Artist
• Dining with Mama & Dada: Purity #1, 2025, porcelain, mason stain, 18.5 x 13 x 11 inches, Oxidation fired. Photo credit: Artist
• Dining with Mama & Dada: Purity #2, 2025, porcelain, mason stain, 22 x 13.5 x 12 inches, Oxidation fired. Photo credit: Artist
• Dining with Mama & Dada, 2025, porcelain, underglaze, Installation variable, Oxidation fired. Photo credit: Artist
• Remnants of the Past #1, 2025, porcelain, underglaze, concrete, 27.6 x 8.6 x 7.25 inches, Oxidation fired. Photo credit: Artist
• Remnants of the Past #2, 2025, porcelain, underglaze, thermocouple, concrete, 27.25 x 9.5 x 8 inches, Oxidation fired. Photo credit: Artist
• Remnants of the Past #3, 2025, porcelain, underglaze, concrete, 27.25 x 9.5 x 8 inches, Oxidation fired. Photo credit: Artist
• Compound House, 2025, stoneware, Kente, underglaze, manganese dioxide, kiln replacement element, mixed media, Installation variable, Oxidation fired. Photo credit: Artist
• One Man Thousand, 2024, stoneware, Kente, underglaze, mixed media, Installation variables, Oxidation fired. Photo credit: Artist
• What Did You Learn Today, 2022, colored porcelain, wood, Installation variable, Oxidation fired. Photo credit: Artist
• Everything and Nothing: The Diary of the One Who Leaves, 2021, porcelain, stoneware, mixed media, 76 x 30 x 30 inches, Oxidation fired. Photo credit: Artist
• Picking the Pieces Together, 2020, stoneware, underglaze, glaze, epoxy, 23 x 18 x 15 inches, Oxidation fired. Photo credit: Artist

Sat high above the banks of Windermere in the English Lake District, is Blackwell Arts and Crafts House, the former holiday home of the Manchester industrialist Sir Edward Holt (1849–1928). Designed by British architect and artist Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott (1865–1945) at the turn of the last century, the house was conceived during a period of renewed interest in artisan crafts and the handmade that countered growing mechanisation and mass production. Subsequent changes saw the family giving up the house, it being used as a school for evacuee’s during the second world war, and finally as offices. Blackwell, and its richly decorated interior showcasing the best craftsmanship of the Arts and Crafts Movement both locally and from across the UK, was only saved from being a distant memory thanks to the Lakeland Arts Trust, who restored the house to allow it to be opened to the public as a period house and gallery in the early 2000s. Upon encountering Blackwell, you cannot help but be captivated by its beauty. The often watery Cumbrian light traverses through the space illuminating the interior so that your eye travels from the wonderfully carved ornamental wooden panelling to the stained glass windows, and from printed wallcoverings to ornamental plasterwork that reflect and play homage to the surrounding natural environment. The House’s orientation allows every window to frame and capture the distant fells beyond. It is a truly special location in which to celebrate creative endeavours, both historical and contemporary. It therefore seems fitting, that this architectural gem of the British Arts and Crafts Movement has become the setting for the first UK retrospective of Edinburgh-based ceramic artist Frances Priest. For over twenty five years, Priest has been exploring decorative motifs, form, and movement, creating sculptural ceramic artworks that have become widely recognised and celebrated for their reverence to ornament.

Frances Priest: Motif | Line | Colour brings together over 60 works of ceramics, drawings and artworks from across her making career, into the intimate and historic setting of Blackwell, allowing for a range of exchanges between the viewer and Priest’s work that is beyond a typical gallery exhibition experience. We do not encounter her work in isolation set within a minimalist white cube, but through encounters integrated into the rich interior spaces of this Arts and Crafts home. It is as if her artworks are part of the fabric of the building, or artifacts of past custodians, allowing for direct correlations between her practice and the legacy of ornamentation she celebrates. Through their placement in this Arts and Crafts tableau, we see the artist’s eye directing these encounters. Some could be easily overlooked but bring such joy upon their discovery, such as her work Shift Intersect I placed in the window well of the house’s porch. Its form echoes the movement of the stained glass flowers and birds in the panel behind, and its subtle colour nods to the slate floor you stand upon. Others directly draw our attention to decorative motifs present in both the interior and artwork, as seen in the positioning of Gathering Bowl – Collage medium situated below the printed hessian wall covering with their echoing daisy motifs in the dining room. In turn, the Cumbrian landscape beyond the windows beneath which seven of her Patterns of Flora vases sit, illuminate and create sympathetic shadowing to the botany she has stunningly illustrated upon their surfaces. Whereas her new series of works created for the White Drawing Room and named in honour of this space, nestled within the decorative integrated shelving by Baillie Scott, feel as if they are part of the original decorative gesso scheme in their delicate tracery of shared motifs of leaves and chevrons and powdery surface treatment. Elsewhere, the gallery display does not follow a specific timeline or key events but creates moments of discussion between the past and present, gallery series and public commissions.

In the case of Priest’s most widely known works, I have often described experiencing these as an encounter with an architectural sculptural memento, due to the opulently drawn and incised ornamentation that encompasses the entirety of the form, almost as if she has scooped up a mosaic or tiled surface and presented it for our delectation. Priest found inspiration in decorative pattern and ornamentation from an early age. As a child, her parents gifted her an abridged reproduction of The Grammar of Ornament by British architect, designer and design theorist Owen Jones (1809–1874) who is considered one of the most influential tastemakers of the Victorian era, due to his pioneering studies on colour theory, geometry and form. This publication came to have a profound and lifelong effect upon Priest, seeing her interpret aspects of its 100 vibrant chromolithographic plates that illustrate Jones design principles which underpinned the natural world and the architecture, textiles, manuscripts and decorative arts of nineteen diverse cultural periods throughout her artistic practice. Her journey through ornamentation has changed over time, from delicate mark making and standalone motifs, to vibrant colourful explosions of decoration. However, at the heart of her practice is her desire to capture through the process of drawing, similarly to the Grammar, the potential of creating a connection between the maker and the viewer, through our shared relationship to decoration. Drawing is always the starting point for her, be it through a pencil line or gouache paint. As with any designer or architect, Priest starts with a draft – a title which she uses for many of works on paper in the exhibition, feeling that there is “a vitality and potential in a drawing that can become anything” and through drawings there is a “direct connection to the artist’s brain”. The process of drawing is then extended to the surface of her ceramics, where she diligently incises her compositions into the body of the clay using a scalpel, tools she has fashioned herself, or impressed, moving with the body of the form allowing the motifs to glide and curl to its contours. Oxides are then often used to demarcate the drawn lines on the surface to form a boundary or outline to the colour application she will then employ, creating different harmonies along a surface, some intense and energetic, others quiet and completive.

Priest’s earliest works of ceramic art were highly influenced by her training in the late 1990s at Edinburgh College of Art, a period when form and process over surface pattern and decoration still had such power in the teaching of craft. However, even in these earliest works on display, some seen here for the first time in over 20 years thanks to the generosity but also a testament to the relationship Priest has garnered with her private collectors, we can find her intent to explore the possibility and the energy of surface decoration even through the subtlest of applications. For example, what seems at first glance as an energetic flourish of an arm drawing a line between the two interconnecting monumental forms of Broken Ellipse Series I, on closer inspection reveals itself to be a series of overlaid ovoid’s encircling the two forms that complete as you move around the sculpture and shift your perspective. Close by in the upper gallery, where we see the Curator’s collective exploration of Priests oeuvre over the 25 years, there is another early work from 2005 – Shifting Grid, juxtaposed cleverly with a series of drawings from her 2024 series Unfixing. These drawings mark a shift away from the full immersive exploration of ornamentation that was her raison d’être at this stage, to motifs that drifted across surfaces as if blown there by some unseen force or loosened from containment. Collectively in this placement of ceramic and set of gouache drawings by the curator, we see clearly the symbiosis of Priest’s practice. One has led to the other, not just through time – the drawings could easily have led to the ceramic, but in the very act of her interpreting motifs and pattern.

Within both the house and the gallery context there are a plethora of examples of Priest’s signature adoration to ornament, namely her ceramic artworks whose entire form is joyfully covered in pattern and colour. The desire to explore ornament and decoration in a more exuberant way by Priest revealed itself following a residency in Southeast Asia in the mid 2000’s. The influence of, and reverence to decoration by the communities and countries she travelled through encouraged her to throw off the constraints of European modernist orthodoxies, and to reexamine her early love of The Grammar of Ornament. These works, often titled in honour of the source material, do not replicate the Victorian codex, but are a starting off point where she melds motifs from it with those she encountered during her travels and through source materials held in museums like my own. Some are constrained by the boundaries of the form wrapping it completely in her compositions which we see in Vase Form, Grammar of Ornament, Byzantine No3 Colour, others as with The Grammar of Ornament India iii are edged as if the piece has been created from a mosaic of motifs. Both not only draw the eye, but a desire to touch and interact, to trace the patterns in which she explores.

Interaction and emotional response to decoration have come to be an important part of Priest’s practice, not only in how she engages and interprets the decorative, but also how she encourages others to do so through her works. Often collaborating with other makers and organisations, Priest has often gone beyond the vessel form to achieve this in the public sphere. The award winning Tiled Corridor – a section of which is reproduced in the gallery space – that was commissioned by the Royal Edinburgh Hospital for its new centre specialising in mental health, and created in collaboration with Craven Dunhill Jackfield, one of the last manufacturers in the UK specialising in traditional hand-made decorative ceramic tiles; references the ceramic walls of the local Victorian tenements familiar to many of the residents and staff. This vibrant tactile artwork cultivates an emotional connection, creating a sense of comfort and familiarity to an otherwise austere environment in its unveiling in 2018. Another example showcased in the exhibition is the digital animation Imbrication from 2022 – sat in the far gallery space in Blackwell – which was originally commissioned by New Media Scotland for the Stepping in Screen at Music Hall Aberdeen, as a collaboration between Priest and digital artist Sam Healy. This venture into the digital sees Priest’s illustrative motifs inspired by the neo-classical architecture of the venue, encoded into an algorithm by Healy creating a mesmerising sequence that shifts and dances before your eyes, never repeating the same pattern twice, in what can easily be described as a living wallpaper.

The strength and success of both Priest’s artworks and commissions is that in their historical connection to design and decorative arts, she cultivates reassuring and familiar yet stimulating emotional encounters for all. Thus, by exhibiting her work in an environment such as Blackwell Arts and Crafts House, we are encouraged to consider that the ethos of the movement in which it was designed and built is not only alive and strong, but that Priest should rightly be considered as part of a lineage of artists, makers and designers who have visually stimulated and enriched our lives.

Sarah Rothwell is the Senior Curator of Modern & Contemporary Design, in the Department of Global Arts, Cultures and Design at National Museums Scotland, Edinburgh. Here, she has collection responsibility for the British and European glass, ceramics, metalwork, jewellery and industrial design collections circa 1945-present. She supports the sector through her position on the Board of Craft Scotland and the Council of the Society of Jewellery Historians. In addition, she has written on Priest’s practice in her paper Capturing Decorative Art – The work of Frances Priest, Journal of the Decorative Arts Society No. 45.

Frances Priest: Motif | Line | Colour is on view between November 7, 2025, and April 11, 2026, at Blackwell – the Arts & Crafts house in Bowness-on-Windermere, United Kingdom. Blackwell is part of Lakeland Arts.

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Captions

• Frances Priest: Motif | Line | Colour, Exhibition installation at Blackwell – the Arts & Crafts house. Image credit: Robin Zahler
• (fig 1) White Drawing Room Collection | Chevron 1 & 4, 2025, Hand built ceramic with inscribed line and vitreous slip. Image credit: Robin Zahler
• (fig 2) Vase Form, Byzantine VIII, 2023, Ceramic form, inscribed line, earthenware glaze and vitreous slip. Courtesy of Cavaliero Finn. Image credit: Robin Zahler
• (fig 3) Drum Form | Chevron / Stripe / Asanoha, 2019, Inscribed ceramic with vitreous slip, glaze and hand-drawn enamel decals. Courtesy of the artist. Image credit: Robin Zahler
• (fig 4) Gathering Bowl: Grammar of Ornament: India I, 2017, Inscribed ceramics with vitreous slip glaze. Courtesy of the artist. Image credit: Robin Zahler
• (fig 5) Shifting Grid, 2005, Hand built ceramic with oxide inlay and vitreous slip. On loan from Susan Rice. Image credit: Robin Zahler
• (fig 6) The Grammar of Ornament India III, 2018, Press moulded and carved ceramic with incised hand drawing, blue oxide wash, vitreous slip and earthenware glaze. On loan from National Museums Scotland. Image credit: Robin Zahler
• (fig 7) Gathering Bowl – Collage medium, 2013, Press moulded and carved ceramic with incised hand drawing, hand painted glaze and enamel transfer. Courtesy of Cavaliero Finn. Image credit: Robin Zahler
• (fig 8) Vase Form, Grammar of Ornament, Byzantine No3 Colour, 2020, Hand built ceramic form, inscribed line, earthenware glaze and vitreous slip. Courtesy of Cavaliero Finn. Image credit: Robin Zahler
• (fig 9) Patterns of Flora – 7 parian vases, 2015, Slip case parian with enamel transfer. Courtesy of the artist. Image credit: Robin Zahler

Faye Papargyropoulou, born in Athens in 1974, is a ceramic artist and designer based in Athens. Since 1992, when she began her studies in art & design with a scholarship in industrial design, she has been exploring the connection between creativity, functionality, and artistic expression. With over 20 years of experience as a creative director at leading advertising agencies, she was responsible for the image and communication of major Greek and international brands, defining their branding and creative strategy. At the same time, she applied her artistic ideas to personal projects in fashion and interior design.

In 2006, she founded her own creative agency, ABOUT: CREATIVE AGENCY, specializing in design, branding, and projects related to fashion and interior design. In 2020, she took the next step in her creative journey by establishing her ceramic studio, CERAMIC 47. Based in Athens, CERAMIC 47 is her personal space for artistic expression, where Faye creates unique ceramic works that highlight the beauty of imperfection and challenge traditional notions of form and functionality.

Her first complete collection, Migrated Forms, expresses her love for fashion, drawing inspiration from fashion patterns. The ceramic works from this collection, unique and multidimensional, were first presented in Athens in February 2023. She later participated in several group exhibitions, including “L’ÉTÉ GREC.” and “WOMEN CERAMIC ARTISTS OF GREECE” at the Moncoinstudio gallery. Today, Faye continues to evolve her ceramic art, focusing on creating unique pieces that explore the relationship between form, functionality, and expression.

Visit Faye Papargyropoulou’s website and Instagram page.

Featured work

Selected works, 2024-2025

New Love, 2025

New Love_When everything starts from scratch. Fresh. Raw. Unknown. And you’re thrown into it, to explore, to make it yours, to taste it like it’s the first time… Again.

New love_When life suddenly explodes in color. Overflowing. Loud. Bright. Too much, in the best way. Everything sharpens. Sounds. Smells. Feelings. There’s no more grey, just black and white, intensity, extremes, color cranked all the way up. Everything’s on max. Everything’s out of control. Your favorite song is blasting. Joy can’t even find the words. And your stomach has tiny people dancing latin non-stop.

New love_And you’re experimenting. You don’t know the rules. There are no rules. You go in blind. Just your instinct. Primitive. Raw. Is it this, or that? Do I say it, or stay quiet? Will it work, or will it burn? Will it lead somewhere? Will I be happy in the end? Isn’t that the question? Isn’t that what we’re all chasing? A new love that flips the world, that changes everything, forever.

From Fragility to Stability, 2024

Looking at the delicate dance of dependence and support that exists between forces of vulnerability and resilience. Imagining a sculpture in motion, two figures, one fragile and translucent like glass, the other solid and rooted like stone. They lean toward each other, neither fully standing alone, each balancing precariously between falling and being held.

This interplay speaks of life’s cyclical nature: in times of strength, we hold those who are weak, and in times of fragility, we find ourselves cradled by those we once held. Strength and vulnerability are not opposites but entwined partners in a constant exchange of roles. Who holds whom? Perhaps the answer is both, for each needs the other to stand, to endure, to create the harmony we call stability.

In this project, I have used two materials. Porcelain embodies vulnerability, delicate and fragile in appearance, yet it is a remarkably strong substance. Soaked in foam, it evokes the sensation that it might shatter at any moment, as though on the verge of breaking apart. And yet, it is precisely these porcelain fragments, in harmony with the solid spheres of black high-fired clay, that sustain the sculpture’s balance. Together, they hold the tension between fragility and strength, instability and grounding.

Space Boy, 2024

Space Boy is a hybrid of earth and cosmos, a figure born of clay yet adorned with stardust. His form is both human and ethereal, a dreamer caught between realms, reaching for infinity.

Captions

• New Love #3, 2025, White & grey stoneware clay with porcelain details. Various glazes, 33cm L x 31cm W x 30cm H, Photo Credit: Apostolis Koukousas
  New Love #4, 2025, White & black stoneware clay. Mat white crawl glaze, 30cm L x 30cm W x 30cm H, Photo Credit: Apostolis Koukousas
  New Love #5, 2025, White & grey stoneware clay. Mat white crawl glaze, 30cm L x 30cm W x 33cm H, Photo Credit: Apostolis Koukousas
  New Love #6, 2025, Black stoneware clay with porcelain. Various glazes, 25cm L x 25cm W x 36cm H, Photo Credit: Apostolis Koukousas
  New Love #7, 2025, White stoneware clay. Mat white lava glaze, 34cm L x 34cm W x 33cm H, Photo Credit: Apostolis Koukousas
  New Love #8, 2025, Grey & white stoneware clay. Blue lava glaze & various glazes, 42cm L x 35cm W x 33cm H, Photo Credit: Apostolis Koukousas
  New Love #9, 2025, White stoneware clay. Mat white glaze, 36cm L x 30cm W x 33cm H, Photo Credit: Apostolis Koukousas
  New Love_10, 2025, White stoneware clay. Various glazes, 25cm L x 27cm W x 28cm H, Photo Credit: Apostolis Koukousas
• From Fragility to Stability #01, 2024, Black stoneware clay and porcelain, 37cm L x 27cm W x 27cm H, Photo Credit: Apostolis Koukousas
  From Fragility to Stability #02, 2024, Black stoneware clay and porcelain, 30cm L x 32cm W x 26cm H, Photo Credit: Apostolis Koukousas
  From Fragility to Stability #03, 2024, Black stoneware clay and porcelain, 30cm L x 13cm W x 22cm H, Photo Credit: Apostolis Koukousas
  From Fragility to Stability #04, 2024, Black stoneware clay and porcelain, 19cm L x 15cm W x 18cm H, Photo Credit: Apostolis Koukousas
  From Fragility to Stability #05, 2024, Black stoneware clay and porcelain, 13cm L x 13cm W x 19cm H, Photo Credit: Apostolis Koukousas
• Space Boy #01, 2024, Black stoneware with glossy glaze, 18cm L x 18cm W x 26cm H, Photo Credit: Apostolis Koukousas
  Space Boy #02, 2024, Gray stoneware with porcelain and matte glaze, 15cm L x 25cm W x 20cm H, Photo Credit: Apostolis Koukousas

Out of the Blue: Heidi Bjørgan and Kari Dyrdal is on view at Taste Contemporary, Geneva

March 12 – May 8, 2026

Taste Contemporary is proud to present Out of the Blue, a two-person exhibition of work by Heidi Bjørgan and Kari Dyrdal at Rue du Vieux-Billard 7, 1205 Genève. Norway has a rich textile and ceramic history with female artists gaining international acclaim in both traditions. Out of the Blue brings together the work of two contemporary Norwegian artists who continue to challenge traditional practices in new and unexpected ways.

Heidi Bjørgan is known for her unique approach to ceramic art and creative curation. Inspired by the philosophy of the great American potter George Ohr, whose goal was to never create identical pieces, she challenges the traditional notion of ceramics. Interested in the tension between the recognizable and the distorted, she takes, as her starting point, familiar jug and vessel forms. Challenging them both physically and emotionally, her pieces often appear as if they have melted or imploded in the kiln. Through cracks, shifts, unpredictable reactions during multiple firing processes, and her unique glazes, each work acquires its own distinctive character. What may be perceived as failure ultimately becomes a central element in her work as she considers beauty within imperfection.

Heidi Bjørgan holds a Master’s in Ceramic Art and Creative Curating from the Bergen Academy of Art and Design. Her works are represented in prestigious collections such as the National Museum of Art, Architecture, and Design, Oslo; the Bergen Art Museum KODE; the Museum of Decorative Arts, Trondheim and the V&A Museum, London.

Textile artist Kari Dyrdal works at the intersection of memory, pattern, and structure creating compositions that offer both intellectual depth and tactile presence. While widely recognised for combining traditional craftsmanship with modern digital tools, for this exhibition, she has created a new series of handwoven, hand-dyed, pieces.

As a child, Kari Dyrdal learned embroidery from her grandmother. This sparked a lifelong interest in textiles. As an adult, she studied textile arts and crafts at both Bergen Kunsthandverkskole and at Croydon College of Art and Technology, London. Her work is included public collections that include the National Museum, Oslo; The National Museum of Decorative Arts and Design, Trondheim; the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the KODE/Vestlandske Kunstindustrimuseum, Bergen.

Contact
info@tastecontemporary.com

Taste Contemporary
7, Rue du Vieux-Billard
1205, Geneva
Switzerland

Installation views by Ruth Ward

Janny Baek: Life Forms opens tomorrow at Joy Machine, Chicago

March 20 – May 9, 2026

Joy Machine is pleased to present Life Forms, a solo exhibition by Janny Baek, on view from March 20 to May 9, 2026.

How do we conceive of change? With fear, excitement, or uncertainty? As Janny Baek builds sculptural ceramics of speculative beings and imagined landscapes, she grapples with these questions. The work follows its own dream logic, one that accepts incongruity and dissonance as necessary to play and experimentation. Marbling hunks of colored clay, coiling bases, and molding a singular material into something new is part of an exploratory practice that embraces transformation and its often strange outcomes.

Life Forms emerges from this dual meaning, invoking both the act of creation and the fantastical works it produces. Neither wholly abstract nor representational, Baek’s sculptures draw on natural structures and processes and invite us to question how we interpret the world around us. Recognizable forms like open blossoms, birds, and creatures are met with the unexpected. These lively components make even the more abstract works appear animate, like ambiguous organisms that might decide to scuttle away. They evoke something primordial and yet are exhilaratingly new.

Baek paints in the way she sketches, as a means of developing ideas and visualizing their potential. For her ceramics, she incorporates hand building alongside the Japanese pottery technique known as nerikomi, which involves splicing and designing patterns with strips of colored clay. “My material choices are a way of thinking about natural processes: color gradients as the continuous nature of change, a multitude of colors as potential, abundance, and vitality, and patterns as signals and communications,” she says.

Hovering between worlds, Baek’s work populates a speculative environment in which beings morph, mutate, and blossom, their individual features forming an otherworldly lineage that’s recognizable but not identical. While “temporarily and imperfectly captured in a moment of many possible transformations,” the works beckon us into a world in which change is not only inevitable but also the most alluring proposition.

Life Forms is Baek’s Chicago debut. An opening reception will be held on March 20, and the artist will be present.

Janny Baek is an artist and architect born in Seoul, South Korea, and raised in Queens, New York. She received her BFA in ceramics from Rhode Island School of Design, and worked as a sculptor in animation and toys before completing her Master’s in Architecture at Harvard University. Baek brings her experience as a sculptor, designer, and architect to her ceramics today. After founding her firm, McMahon-Baek Architecture, in 2014, she returned to the medium in 2019. Her work is part of the collection of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York and has been shown at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, the Korea Society, and the Korea Ceramics Foundation, among others. Baek currently lives and works in lower Manhattan with her husband and their two daughters.

Contact
hello@joymachine.art

Joy Machine Gallery
4148 N Elston Ave
Chicago, IL 60618
United States

Photos courtesy of the gallery

Janet Abrams: Balancing Acts is on view at Zane Bennett Contemporary Art, Santa Fe

January 30 – May 2, 2026

Zane Bennett Contemporary Art announces Balancing Acts, the first solo exhibition of Cranbrook Academy of Art alumna and renowned art, architecture and design critic Janet Abrams.

Comprising over a dozen sculptures that put clay in conversation with diverse materials—including steel, copper, rawhide, rubber, and wood—the show tracks Abrams’s evolving studies of balance, gravity, and precariousness. Drawing inspiration from the work of 20th-century sculptors such as Alexander Calder, Ruth Duckworth, Lucio Fontana, Eva Hesse, Barbara Hepworth, and Ruth Vollmer, her sculptures set opacity and weight in contrast to translucency and levity and reject the convention that ceramic artifacts must be earth- (or pedestal-) bound. Forms and materials are brought together in compositions that seem to harness kinetic energy, conveying a frisson of risk—a condition she describes as “a metaphor for the precariousness of life itself.”

Early works from the exhibition, such as Vicissitude and Involution, show her interest in flowing, organic clay forms resting on rectilinear supports: dangling from a cantilevered copper bar or hanging over a horizontal surface. Later works, like Gather and Kernel, set the natural hues of high- and low-fire clay bodies against semi-translucent materials, allowing an interplay between the obduracy of solid objects and the muted light that filters through rawhide or urethane rubber. Zane Bennett gallery director Carina Evangelista notes:

Abrams merges her deep knowledge of architecture and design with her fascination for materials, ignited by touching clay slip at a crafts school during a conference in the early 2000s. That tactile epiphany led her to pivot from her long-established career as a writer to become a practicing artist. Visual witticism runs through her vocabulary of ceramic elements—rods, loops, hoops, tapered or teardrop forms—while their armatures in wood, metal, rawhide and rubber seem like responses to structural riddles. Balancing Acts presents an array of objects that hang, perch, or float on their bases, illustrating how the weight and fragility of clay can serve as its own fulcrum. Within the architecture of precarity and acrobatics with gravity of Abrams’s work is the spirit of play.

Abrams rediscovered clay in her late 40s during her directorship of the University of Minnesota Design Institute in Minneapolis (2000–2008). Evening classes at Northern Clay Center confirmed her enthusiasm for ceramics, leading to an MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. There she experimented with clay and unconventional materials, making installations out of spun cotton candy, hot glue strung with dead houseflies, egg yolk in panty hose, and honey dripping through vintage kitchen tools. These forays laid the foundation for Abrams’s subsequent practice, which moves freely between a variety of materials and tools, using fabrication techniques acquired at Santa Fe Community College. Abrams views Balancing Acts as the corollary materialization of her ongoing interest in the relationship between the “natural” and the “technological,” in the creation of the hand-made and attention to tactility in an era of digital disembodiment, and in narratives of finding one’s foothold during displacement or diasporic drift.

About the artist

Janet Abrams, born London, 1959, lives and works in Santa Fe, NM.

Abrams came to studio art after a long career as a journalist, critic, and academic, with stints as staff writer for Blueprint and I.D. International Design magazines, editor at the Netherlands Design Institute, director of the University of Minnesota Design Institute, and teacher in the MFA and MArch programs at Yale University, Parsons School of Design, and the University of New Mexico.

In 2004, while running the Design Institute, she was invited to a conference on “Craft and Design: Hand, Mind, and the Creative Process” at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, which changed the course of her career. During a conference break, she found her way to the ceramics studio, dipped her hand in a bucket of clay slip, and became captivated by the material. Four years later, she entered Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan for an MFA in ceramics, where she experimented with materials beyond clay and discovered artists whose inquiries into physical phenomena such as light, gravity, and atmospheric conditions would inform her own practice.

In 2014, a year after relocating to Santa Fe, Abrams won the SITE Santa Fe’s SPREAD 5.0 competition for visual artists. She used the award to establish her studio and take sculpture courses at Santa Fe Community College.

She holds a BS in architecture (London University) and a PhD in architectural history, theory and criticism (Princeton University). She has had residencies at A.I.R. Vallauris in France, the European Ceramic Work Centre in the Netherlands, and MacDowell in New Hampshire. She has participated in workshops at Anderson Ranch, Banff Centre, Haystack, and Ox-Bow School of Art. Her essays have appeared in artist monographs, exhibition catalogs, and periodicals such as Ceramic Review, Crafts, Domus, frieze, New York Times, and Southwest Contemporary. A collection of her writings, Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me A Bauhaus: Profiles in Architecture and Design, was published in 2020. That same year, she co-curated and designed/built the website for Quartz Inversion, a showcase of work made by over sixty international ceramic artists during the COVID-19 lockdown.

Contact
info@zanebennettgallery.com

Zane Bennett Contemporary Art
435 S Guadalupe St. fl. 2
Santa Fe, NM 87501
United States

Installation views by Kim Cook. Images of individual works by Marylene Mey. Courtesy of Zane Bennett Contemporary Art

Captions

• Janet Abrams, Augury, 2016, Stoneware and copper, 25 x 18 x 12 in / 63.5 x 45.7 x 30.5 cm
• Janet Abrams, Gather, 2017, Rawhide and unglazed ceramic (low-fired micaceous red and micaceous white clay, high-fired Black Mountain Sculpture Clay), 21 x 39 x 6 in / 53.3 x 99.1 x 15.2 cm
• Janet Abrams, Homage to C.S., 2017, Glazed ceramic with manganese dioxide wash, Iris blue glaze (matte), and orange glaze (gloss), 15 1/2 x 15 x 10 in / 39.4 x 38.1 x 25.4 cm
• Janet Abrams, Kernel, 2018, Stoneware, urethane, poplar, and gold leaf, 11 x 9 x 8 in / 27.9 x 22.9 x 20.3 cm. Base: 4 x 13 x 6 in / 10.2 x 33 x 15.2 cm
• Janet Abrams, Vicissitude, 2010, Stoneware, copper, plywood, and steel, Stoneware: 36 x 24 x 3 in / 91.4 x 61 x 7.6 cm. Copper: 4 1/2 x 24 x 4 1/2 in / 11.4 x 61 x 11.4 cm
• Janet Abrams, Sostenuto, 2010, Unglazed, bisque-fired stoneware, poplar, leather, and brass piano pedals, Stoneware: 20 x 38 x 6 in / 50.8 x 96.5 x 15.2 cm. Poplar: 10 x 72 x 10 in / 25.4 x 182.9 x 25.4 cm. Leather: 60 in / 152.4 cm. Brass piano pedals: 7 in / 17.8 cm
• Janet Abrams, Orbital, 2016-2025, Ceramic (Black Mountain Sculpture Clay) and pine, Ellipse: 7 x 22 x 2 in / 17.8 x 55.9 x 5.1 cm. Base: 5 1/2 x 24 1/2 x 5 1/2 in / 14 x 62.2 x 14 cm
• Janet Abrams, Pele’s Tear, 2018-2025, High-fired, unglazed stoneware (Death Valley sculpture clay), 22 x 8 x 12 in / 55.9 x 20.3 x 30.5 cm
• Janet Abrams, They, 2015-2026, Stoneware and rawhide, 15 x 14 x 16 in / 38.1 x 35.6 x 40.6 cm

Toshiaki Noda: (re)(de)constructing is on view at Alison Bradley Projects, New York

February 19 – April 4, 2026

Alison Bradley Projects is pleased to share Toshiaki Noda: (re)(de)constructing. This is the artist’s first presentation with the gallery, on view from February 19th through April 4th, 2026. Working from within the material and cultural legacy of Japanese ceramics, the artist produces indexical sculptures—objects that register gesture, process, and transformation through their form and surface.

Noda grew up in Arita, the porcelain capital of the world, as part of an Arita ware-dealing family. In the tradition-rich town, porcelain has long been synonymous with perfection. Yet the works in this exhibition pursue a different logic: imbued with verve and material intensity, they deconstruct conventional ceramic production. Rather than moving toward refinement or resolution, forms are fragmented, reassembled, and reimagined through a process of r epetition and play.
On view is a series of wall-hanging slab works in which past sculptures are flattened and reinterpreted as two-dimensional compositions. Employing multi-colored glaze as one would paint, Noda reconciles his past forms onto flattened planes. His self-taught practice is defined by a constant revision of past work, assembling pieces made years earlier alongside newer ones. Through these subsequent iterations, his objects exist in both two and three dimensions, blurring the painting and sculpture paradigms. This back-and-forth multiplies interpretation, allowing his objects to remain provisional and open to improvisation.

The sculptures are resolutely non-functional. Though they draw on the vocabulary of utsuwa—vessels traditionally understood as containers—they resist utility and closure. Cylindrical bodies, crockery, and supports appear familiar yet unusable, hovering between recognition and estrangement. This balance, between weirdness and familiarity, anchors the work, drawing viewers in through its playful ambiguity.
Mimicking soda cans and industrial detritus as underlying structures, Noda introduces traces of mass production and disposability that remain partially legible beneath layers of polychrome and crackling glaze. Rather than functioning as readymades, these elements are absorbed into the sculptural body, contributing to hybrid objects that oscillate between abstraction and reference, image and object.

Noda approaches clay with an attitude of receptivity and collaboration. Glazes are layered, reapplied, and refired, producing unexpected chromatic shifts, cracks, and spills. Surfaces record negotiation rather than control, allowing chance and material resistance to shape the final form. The result is a dynamic sculptural language that feels animated by process rather than fixed intention. This approach situates the work within a lineage of Japanese artists—from early modern ceramics to postwar avant-garde groups—who embraced asobi, or play, as a serious aesthetic strategy. Rejecting borrowed objects and direct utility, these artists forged sculptural forms that expressed internal states through material experimentation. Noda extends this lineage, wielding the language of ceramics to produce a vocabulary of unplaceable abstraction—objects that feel at once intimate and unfamiliar.

The selected works in (re)(de)constructing resist the notion of completion, operating instead through continual revision. Bearing a stratigraphic record of prior forms and interventions, the objects are positioned as sites of accumulated duration rather than as resolved endpoints. In this recursive process, authorship becomes distributed, and the resulting forms remain structurally open—neither fixed nor final—asserting a practice grounded in ongoing negotiation rather than closure.

Words by Olivia Breibart

Toshiaki Noda (b. 1982) is a New York–based artist working primarily in ceramic sculpture, alongside mixed media sculpture, drawing, and painting. Born in Arita, Saga Prefecture, Japan—a historic center of porcelain production—he grew up immersed in ceramics and Japanese calligraphy.

Noda earned a BFA in visual arts with a focus on printmaking from California State University, Long Beach. After relocating to New York City, he established his career as an artist, centering ceramics as his primary me dium. His heritage and printmaking training inform a distinctive approach to form, surface, and process. Using hand-building, wheel-throwing, carving, stacking, and revision, Noda creates gestural ceramic forms that depart from traditional Imari smoothness. He often begins with familiar man-made objects—such as garments, shoes, boxes, bricks, and vessels—then distorts and reimagines them to explore irony, transience, humor, and fragility. His work exists at the intersection of pottery, craft, design, and sculpture, questioning conventional boundaries within ceramics.

Recent solo exhibitions include OV Project, Brussels (2022); Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco (2021); and Issues from the Hands at Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo (2017), with additional shows in New York and Milan. His work is included in The William Louis Dreyfus Foundation, and he is a recipient of a 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship. His work has been reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle and Sculpture Magazine.

Contact
claire@alisonbradleyprojects.com

Alison Bradley Projects
526 West 26th Street, Suite 814
New York, NY 10001
United States

Images courtesy Dario Lasagni and Alison Bradley Projects

Captions

• (fig 1, 2, 3) Toshiaki Noda, Untitled, 2022, Glazed ceramic, 12 x 9 x 10 in / 30.5 x 22.9 x 25.4 cm
• (fig 4) Toshiaki Noda, Untitled, 2021, Glazed ceramic, 20 1/2 x 9 x 8 1/2 in / 52.1 x 22.9 x 21.6 cm
• (fig 5) Toshiaki Noda, Untitled, 2021, Glazed ceramic, 17 x 10 x 8 1/2 in / 43.2 x 25.4 x 21.6 cm
• (fig 6) Toshiaki Noda, Untitled, 2021, Glazed ceramic, beverage can, plaster, paint, epoxy, metal wire, 11 x 9 x 5 in / 27.9 x 22.9 x 12.7 cm