Artists are invited to apply to THROW/BACK, the 2027 NCECA Annual Exhibition, curated by Adriana Proser and Ellen Hoobler and presented at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, from March 10 to June 6, 2027. Running alongside CHARM, the 61st NCECA conference, the exhibition explores how ceramic artists navigate continuity and change, preserving and transforming forms, materials, and cultural histories across time. Open to artists from around the world, the call welcomes applicants aged 18 and older working primarily with clay, including mixed-media and selected video works where ceramic processes remain central. The deadline to apply is June 17, 2026. NCECA members may apply free of charge, while non-members pay a $50 entry fee.

Emerging ceramic artists in the United States are invited to apply for the 2026 Chrysalis Award, presented by the James Renwick Alliance for Craft. Now in its 10th year, the award supports artists in the early stages of their careers who demonstrate excellence and a strong commitment to developing their practice. This year’s edition focuses on ceramics, with the recipient receiving a $5,000 unrestricted award, a one-year JRACraft membership, and the opportunity to present their work at a JRACraft event. Applications close August 23, 2026.

The Gardiner Museum presents the International Ceramic Art Fair (ICAF) from May 28 to August 16 in Toronto, expanding its biennial programme from a 10-day event into a 12-week platform exploring contemporary ceramics through art, design, technology, and community. Centered on the theme “the city and the commons,” the fair brings together Canadian and international artists, including Ronald Rael, Sharif Farrag, Hadi Jamali, Jolie Ngo, Christine Howard Sandoval, and Anders Herwald Ruhwald, alongside exhibitions and workshops. Highlights include the ICAF Symposium (May 29–30), featuring keynote speaker Ronald Rael on emerging technologies and ancestral building practices, as well as panels examining ceramics, architecture, and shared space.

The Ceramics Research Centre-UK, in partnership with the Victoria and Albert Museum, invites audiences to Permanence/Impermanence: Collecting & Archiving Contemporary Clay Practices, taking place at the University of Westminster, London, from June 24–26, 2026. The three-day conference explores how ephemeral, site-specific, participatory, and live clay practices can be collected, archived, and made accessible to future audiences. Speakers include Florence Peake, Louisa Buck, Alun Graves, Phoebe Cummings, Clare Twomey, Natalie Baerselman le Gros, Tessa Peters, Nicole Seisler, Ashley Thorpe, and others. Tickets cost £25.

Australian ceramic artists have two major award deadlines coming up. The North Queensland Ceramic Awards 2026, held at Perc Tucker Regional Gallery in Townsville, invites entries for its biennial exhibition and offers a $10,000 acquisitive major prize, alongside several additional awards. Entries close July 7, 2026. In Victoria, the Clunes Ceramic Award 2026 is also open, with a $10,000 major prize. Finalists will be exhibited in Clunes from October 4 to November 1, 2026, with entries closing August 9, 2026.

Young artists worldwide are invited to apply for the 14th Shiwan Cup International Youth Ceramic Sculpture and Architectural Ceramic Art Competition, organized by the International Academy of Ceramics (IAC) and the Guangdong Shiwan Ceramics Museum. Open to applicants aged 18–45, this year’s competition responds to the theme Where Ends Begin. A total of 100 works will be shortlisted, with awards including a Grand Prize of ~$26,000 and additional prizes across several categories. Applications are free and open until August 31, 2026.

Our friends at The Kiln Rooms in London are hosting their Summer Ceramic Sale on June 5-7, bringing together over 80 local artists and designers across their Copeland Park and Bellenden Road studios. Visitors can discover handmade ceramics, meet the makers, and see where the work is created. All pieces will be for sale, directly supporting their practices, with 5% of sales donated to FiredUp4. The event is free and family- and dog-friendly.

Exhibitions

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

• Maryam Yousif: Above Earth, Under The Rays of the Sun at The Pit, Los Angeles
• Claire Curneen: Between my finger and my thumb at Ruthin Craft Centre, Ruthin
• Shaping Clay: Women artists in contemporary Japanese ceramics at Dai Ichi Arts, New York
• Ken Price at Lisson Gallery, London
• Twenty Thousand Years at Galerie Fabian Lang, Zürich
• Sofia Beça: Where the Body Listens to Matter — Records of a Working Body at Espaço Mira, Porto
• Forms From The Subsoil at Sala de Arte CCU, Santiago, Chile

What’s on View

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

1. Roberto Lugo: American Crib: What’s Happening? at The Clay Studio, Philadelphia
2. Maddy Inez: Nascence at Megan Mulrooney, Los Angeles
3. Architect of the Bizen Renaissance: Mori Tōgaku at Joan B Mirviss, New York
4. Ming-Miao Ko: Devenir and Monika Debus: Beyond Salt and Earth at Centre Céramique Contemporaine La Borne, La Borne
5. Jeff Shapiro: Solo at Lucy Lacoste Gallery, Concord
6. Grayson Fair: Pressure Point at Kouri + Corrao Gallery, Santa Fe
7. Colleen Carlson and Sui Park: Between at Sculpture Space NYC, New York
8. Emily Orta: Whims of Panspermia at DIMIN, New York
9. Henry Goodman Exhibition for Emerging Artists at the Art Gallery of Burlington, Ontario
10. Susie Choi: Right side wrong side at Sabbia Gallery, Sydney
11. GENSKÆR: Clara Toksvig, Thea Djurhuus, Sophia Moe at Peach Corner Gallery, Copenhagen
12. Laura Põld: Beautiful Pulsating Web at Kahan Art Space, Vienna
13. Trinidad Contreras: Solid Waves at Hannah Gallery, Barcelona

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Featured image – Laura Põld: Beautiful Pulsating Web at Kahan Art Space, Vienna

Maryam Yousif: Above Earth, Under The Rays of the Sun is on view at The Pit, Los Angeles

May 9 – June 17, 2026

Yousif’s third exhibition with the gallery takes its title from the inscription on a curse tablet found in the royal tombs of the Assyrian queens at Nimrud, where the phrase describes the mortal realm: the place of people who live above the earth, beneath the sun. Working from this ancient text as a point of departure, the exhibition brings together large-scale and intimate works that move between funerary artifact and living ornament, between what is carried out of a place and what endures. Maryam Yousif was born in Baghdad, Iraq in 1985, where she grew up surrounded by her mother’s paintings and handmade objects, emigrating to Canada at the age of 10.Yousif works primarily in clay, producing figurative sculptures that occupy a space between ancient devotional objects and contemporary folk art. Her signature “habibti” figures (Arabic for “sweetheart” or “my love”) are modeled on Sumerian votive statues, the small stone stand-ins placed inside temples by worshippers who could not enter themselves. Her lustrous, layered glazes fuse the exuberance of Bay Area Funk ceramics with the ancient visual traditions of her homeland. Running through the work is a persistent question: what it means to leave a place, potentially forever, and what do we carry with us when we do so?

The centerpiece of her new exhibition, “Head of Female Figure with Deportation Earrings” is a monumental ceramic head, approximately 23 inches tall and modeled after an 8th-century BCE ivory female figure excavated from the Burnt Palace at Nimrud, now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Like its ancient source, Yousif’s head is adorned with a richly worked diadem with her interpretation incor porating rosettes, pomegranates tendrils, and rib shaped earrings inspired by her grandmother’s that were brought back as a gift from her grandfather upon his return after being deported to Iran in the early 80s during the Iran Iraq war. The back of the head carries a boat scene from the marshes of Iraq, a landscape her mother has painted throughout her life and one that holds deep folkloric resonance in Iraqi visual culture. Flanking this central figure in the installation are a pair of tall palms, each about 33 inches high, their shafts decorated with a grid of red and black dots echoing ancient decorative patterning found on a 9th century oil lamp.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, Habibti figures in yellow, green, and tangerine are each swathed in hand-formed ceramic rosettes, their faces composed and directly above the accumulated blooms. Various objects – a teal Dallah with a cascading drip glaze, a stone-like bird vessel paired with a small pomegranate bottle, small harps, Pazuzu figures, and pomegranates in various glazes – populate the room like an inven tory of talismans.

“Above Earth, Under The Rays of the Sun” is an exhibition about the objects that travel with us and the ones we leave behind. The royal tombs at Nimrud, discovered by Iraqi archaeologists in 1988, yielded extraordinary jewelry, resplendent vessels, and a clay tablet inscribed with a curse threatening those who would disturb the queens’ rest. For Yousif, this curse text resonates beyond its archaeological context, touching on the superstitions of her Iraqi childhood and, the protective power of the evil eye that recurs throughout her work, and the deeply human impulse to surround the dead with beautiful things. To recreate these funerary objects in clay, she writes, is “to forge a new sense of life.” Personal memory and deep history fold into one another throughout.. The exhibition extends Yousif’s singular territory in contemporary American ceramics – a practice where Bay Area Funk’s irreverence and material freedom meet the visual legacy of ancient Mesopotamia, held together by the lived experience of being in diaspora.

Maryam Yousif was born in Baghdad, Iraq in 1985 and lives in San Francisco, California. She received a Master of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2017, and received a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Windsor, Ontario in 2008. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include ICA San Francisco, CA (2024); Rebecca Camacho Presents, San Francisco, CA (2024); The Pit, Los Angeles / Palm Springs, CA (2023, 2021); David B. Smith, Denver, CO (2022); and Andrew Rafacz, Chicago, IL (2021); amongst others. Yousif’s work has been featured in exhibitions such as Making Moves: A Collection of Feminisms at Crocker Museum of Art, Sacramento, CA (2025); Rave into the Future at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, CA (2025); Ritual Clay: Cathy Lu, Paz G, Maryam Yousif at Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis (2024); GGLA, Los Angeles, CA (2024); Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, CA (2023); Museum of Art & Design, New York, NY (2023); and Massey Klein Gallery, New York, NY (2023); amongst others. She was a finalist for the Museum of Art and Design’s Burke Prize (2021), and completed an AICAD fellowship at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Ceramics Department (2019-2021). She received the Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship Grant in 2023. Her work can be found in the public collections of the Museum of Art and Design, New York, NY; the Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; the Barjeel Art Foundation, UAE, and the Crocker Museum of Art, Sacramento, CA. She’s represented by The Pit, Los Angeles, and Rebecca Camacho, San Francisco.

Contact
info@the-pit.la

The Pit
3015 Dolores St
Los Angeles CA 90065
United States

Photography by Chris Hanke. Courtesy of the Artist and The Pit.

Captions

• Habibti in Yellow Desert Rosette Dress, 2026, Glazed ceramic, 18 x 12 x 12 in / 45.72 x 30.48 x 30.48 cm
• Habibti in Green Rosette Dress, 2026, Glazed ceramic, 14 x 11 x 10 in / 35.56 x 27.94 x 25.40 cm
• Queen’s Rosettes from Tomb II Vessel in White Pebble, 2026, Glazed ceramic, 17 x 14.5 x 5 in / 43.18 x 36.83 x 12.70 cm
• Protection Vessel Dress, 2026, Glazed ceramic, 19.75 x 13.75 x 4.75 in / 50.17 x 34.92 x 12.06 cm
• Dallah in the Shape of Bird, 2026, Glazed ceramic, 13 x 11 x 5 in / 33.02 x 27.94 x 12.70 cm
• Stone Bird Vessel and Stout Pomegranate Bottle in Tangerine, 2026, Glazed ceramic, Bird: 11.5 x 12 x 3.5 in / 29.21 x 30.48 x 8.89 cm; Orange Pomegranate: 5 x 5 x 5 in / 12.70 x 12.70 x 12.70 cm
• Mom’s Wolves Ring, 2026, Glazed ceramic, 3.25 x 9 x 9 in / 8.25 x 22.86 x 22.86 cm
• Warp Palms, 2026, Glazed ceramic, 7 x 10 x 8 in / 17.78 x 25.40 x 20.32 cm
• Catalogue Scroll, 2026, Glazed ceramic, 19 x 20 x 5 in / 48.26 x 50.80 x 12.70 cm
• Head of Female Figure with Deportation Earrings, 2026, Glazed ceramic, 23 x 25.5 x 15 in / 58.42 x 64.77 x 38.10 cm

In the spring of 2020, my mother casually mentioned that my father had been involved in the Sir George Williams Affair. At the time, she was living in long-term care. It was COVID, and we were visiting on FaceTime. I had been reading some of my reflections on mine and my late father’s lived experience of race. My mother interrupted my monologue, “…of course there’s the time when your father was interviewed about his relationship with Perry over that race thing by Readers’ Digest …” My mother passed a few months later, but not before I was able to bring her my father’s photo albums and she identified a photograph of Perry Anderson with my father, emphasizing that they had been “thick as thieves” during their PhD studies in Biology at Western University in the early 1960s.

I hadn’t known about the Sir George Williams race protests of 1969. I knew about Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Junior, Smokey Carmichael, the Black Panthers… But nothing of Canada and its reckoning with anti-Black racism.

I was born in May of 1968 in Fredericton, New Brunswick. My mother was white, born and raised on a farm in Ohio. My father’s biological mother is mythologized as being adopted from Ceylon by French missionaries, his father a descendant of Indo-indentured workers. I pass for Indian. My father’s genes dominated my DNA. He was a dark-skinned, Indo-Trinidadian, double diaspora’d into Canada at the age of 23. He came to study at McMaster University in Hamilton in 1953. By the time I was born, he was a tenure-track Biology professor at the University of New Brunswick. In 1969, my father was 39 years old. He and my mother had fled Sudbury from his first teaching post early in 1968, as my father’s lab had been burned to the ground, and bricks thrown through their windows – an attempt to run the threat of the “other” out of town. These are facts that were never mentioned to me when I was growing up – in fact never mentioned at all, until after my father had retired, and was able to unpack his memories with the expansiveness of time, so necessary to heal the depth of racially-motivated trauma.

In 2023, I was invited to create a solo exhibition for Le centre céramique Bonsecours, part of the ceramics CEGEP in old Montreal. After grappling for some time, I realized that the story I had to tell in Montreal, for Montreal, was this story of systemic racism within a Canadian academic institution in Montreal in the late 1960s; the story of young people of every colour standing up for Black equality in Canada; the story of allyship, of other West Indians of Indian descent taking a stand for their Black colleagues; my father’s story, that portrays him as an immigrant of colour supporting his white friend whose overt anti-Blackness sparked unprecedented violence; the story of decades of racial tension between West Indians of African descent and West Indians of South Asian descent that underpinned my father’s story.

I struggled to render my destabilization into art in the studio. I had first proposed loose figurative works in different clay bodies, ostensibly representing different races, but this quickly felt like too simplistic an allegory. As someone who generally works in abstraction, or with archival photography on ceramics, I found myself unable to translate these thoughts into physical expression. I tried different clay bodies at different temperatures, made test tiles, and assessed their qualities adjacent to each other: unglazed, raw, with or without slip, visceral. It was only after months that I realized that I cannot make art that reflects in any way, didactically or literally, in abstraction or figuratively, the individuals or groups of individuals that were players in the Sir George Williams Incident: I can only make art that tumbles out of the turmoil and complexity of my feelings – my feelings about my father, about the growing hurt and disappointment that he never told me about his involvement with the race protest, despite the fact that we were, as adults, atypically close friends as father and daughter.

My father had shared much of his past, his activism as a pacifist during the Vietnam War; his proactive pro-union engagement with the labour movement; his support of and counselling with closeted gay students; the violence that seeped into his core doled out at the hands of his schoolteachers and most viscously, his father. He had understood my deeply rooted passion for meaning-making through the colour of our skin. He had read my MFA thesis on the inter-subjectivity of mixed-race identity and the Caribbean identity. On the subject of Canada’s largest race protest, he had been silent.

I began to journal. This was not premeditated writing, it was an exercise designed to enable free-flow, where you simply write to write, to fill up three pages, no matter what, every day, and see what happens. I wrote about systems and structure, not about individuals. I wrote about how I ‘felt’ the pain of students pushed into corners. I let go of my struggle to represent the human body. And so, I began to understand that the churn I felt was larger than any few individuals, it felt larger than any one academic institution, it felt systemic, it felt structural: it felt intimately linked to the shame invoked by racism and the clash between a collective voice attempting to claim a place of contestation, faced with a collective establishment, attempting to quell these voices and maintain the status quo.

I decided to center my attention on the Henry F. Hall Building, the building that the students occupied for 12 days over five decades ago. The building itself, a physical witness to history that offered no answers; like my late father, it is forever silent. The building was built by the very system that the Black students attempted to expose and challenge. System as structure, is the nucleus of my installation. Power Structure is the pivotal piece in the exhibition. It begins with the ‘feelings’ of being pushed into corners. I physically pushed my fists and my knuckles into plaster corners, thirty-six times: nine levels in each of four corners show the oppression of being pushed against a wall, into a corner. The corners frame a hollow steel structure that evokes the Hall Building, while at the same time lays bare the hidden reinforced steel which form the skeletal frame of the brutalist concrete architecture designed by Ross, Fish, Duschenes and Barrett, one of the white, male, hetero led premiere national architectural firms of the day.

I have stacked the corners of the Power Structure on steel rods, and populated the grid-like space with suggestions, possibilities, and enigmatic visual triggers, fired onto a granite clay body, that when underfired, resembles concrete. The images on the tiles are distorted by the firing process, a metaphor for the distortion of truth surrounding the fire that was the disastrous culmination of the police raid and arrests on the sit in. The definitive truth of the incident has been so distorted through the media, through the passage of time, and through the necessarily transfigurative retelling of story. I rely on archive, and yet I also see the events through my own lens – that of a racialized artist, trying to find meaning in my country’s checkered past and my own mixed heritage.

I swept the actual salted stone and grit from the sidewalks along Mackay Street in the winter of 2024, and pressed it into the creases of the stacked corners. The clay crumbled from the salt after sitting for several weeks. Another metaphor. I mixed the clay with cement – clay and cement being familiarly acquainted through the silicone arts. I ‘slapped’ the clay onto the floor, strewn with pebbles and post-firing debris. I hung ceramic fragments with photographic glimpses of the past, headlines, news clippings, pixelated black and white photography – the charged racial politics of the time. I scattered ceramic computer cards on the ground and suspended them within Power Structure, reminiscent of the rainfall of computer punch cards, that fluttered from the ninth floor in silent protest onto the streets. Perhaps the most iconic image of the protest – the ‘rain’ of paper cards.

In the spring, as I was testing different clay bodies for punch cards, serendipity startled me with a life-altering intervention. I had had five pages of newspaper clippings from the several hundred I had reviewed from the Concordia Archives printed in black and white on decal paper to use as tests. I cut up sections of the pages and applied them to different unglazed vitrified ceramic surfaces. I was hoping to use paper-clay, its pinkness and relative weightlessness mimics the stiff thin card paper of the punch cards from the late 1960’s that I remember using in our family as grocery shopping lists for years after they became obsolete. One of the tests simply wouldn’t stick to the tile. I tried and tried. Exasperated, I pulled out the Elmer’s white glue, and as the decal refused to be placed, I noticed in small print, at the top of a column, the name ‘MacKenzie.’ Then on the previous column, at the bottom, ‘Joseph.’ Then I read the descriptor, ‘West Indian’ then the word ‘Trinidad’ , and I instantly knew I had been gifted the certitude of my mother’s claim that my father had been interviewed about Perry and the Sir George Williams. I traced the excerpt to an article published on February 22 in Times Magazine. Her memory had distorted the source, but there was my father’s character witness in black and white in an article entitled, “The Forgotten Man.”

The title seemed to define the exhibition, and it stuck. I created a digital collage featuring a photo of Perry and my father, the headlines from the day and the Times article as a backdrop. I pulled a cyanotype print on porcelain, backlit it, and set up the ephemera and art in the gallery. The rest of the installations came easily, fast and furiously. I found a blueprint of the 7th floor of the Hall Building in a 1976 published PhD paper, and used it to screenprint onto paper-clay, then crumpled the clay and pierced the objects with rebar. I wedged cyanotype blue pigments into concrete-like clay and did likewise. I ripped the street scenes of the protest into pieces and recomposed them digitally and output them as semi-transparent ‘smoke screens’ on mylar and hung them in the windows.

I designed six life-sized windows, each 3′ x 6′ comprised of three tableaux of archival digital collage: bold colours, disturbing photographs, newspaper pages of unsettling echoes from this near-forgotten past. Somehow, I begin to reckon with the past, its ghosts and its reverberations. Perhaps most importantly, I purposefully nudge my generation and the next generation off of our fulcrums, out of complacency, and into a portal of curiosity in order to seek our own truths, find our own meanings, assess our own values and beliefs with regard to what was, and what might be.

Heidi McKenzie is a ceramic artist and arts journalist based in Toronto, Canada. She completed her MFA at OCADU in 2014. Working across ceramics, photography, digital media, and archive, her practice draws on her Indo-Trinidadian and Irish-American heritage to explore ancestry, race, migration, colonization, and healing.

L’homme oublié : tenir compte de l’affaire Sir George Williams, 1969 was on view between October and November 2025 at Centre de céramique Bonsecours, Montréal.

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Installation views by Olivier Lamarre.

Archival images courtesy of Library and Archives, Concordia University.

Ken Price is on view at Lisson Gallery, London

May 1 – July 25, 2026

In collaboration with Matthew Marks Gallery, Lisson is pleased to present an exhibition of work by the influential LA-based artist, Ken Price (Los Angeles, 1935-2012). Price was a relentlessly inventive artist who challenged forms through sculpture, painting and drawing throughout his five-decade career. As the first solo presentation of his work in the UK in nearly a decade, the exhibition brings together both sculpture and drawing, several of which are on view in London for the first time.

At Lisson Gallery, the exhibition showcases Price’s mastery of ceramics and expansion of the possibilities of the medium. As early as the 1960s and 70s, Price created diminutively scaled works whose innovative and outlandish shapes subverted the functionality of traditional ceramics. Works such as Prone (1997), Itself (2003), Yin (2009) and Amazon (2003) – formed from fired and painted clay – represent Price’s biomorphic, often erotic, sculptural creations. Speaking inherently to the viewer’s body, these fluid compositions play with form and balance, intimacy and seclusion. Through processes of layering and sanding pigment, Price achieves surfaces of depth and luminosity, transforming clay into objects that appear almost otherworldly.

Price was committed to utilising clay as a tool to explore his unique place and time in history. Deeply informed by the vernacular traditions of Mexican pottery and the improvisational rhythms of jazz and Pop culture, Price’s work is characterised by its vibrant palette, organic forms and tactile surfaces. His forms are also inspired by his experiences in Venice, California and New Mexico. Price witnessed the burgeoning contemporary art scene across Los Angeles, with the birth of a profusion of cultural institutions and artistic movements. He was a key figure in the LA artistic movements that originated in southern California in the 1960s, alongside other prominent artists. Following his first solo show at the Ferus Gallery in 1960, at the age of just 25, Price’s work was profiled on the cover of Artforum (1963), and his first solo presentation at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York opened in 1969. In later years Price had significant exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles, the Menil Collection in Houston, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas.

Toward the end of his life, Price initiated a dramatic shift in scale and finish, working at a notably larger scale thus amplifying the physical and perceptual impact of his forms. His late sculptures are masterful arrays of colour where the material seems to dissolve, allowing iridescence and delicacy to exist in perfect harmony. Hovering between abstraction and figuration, the work combines sensuality with humour, their smooth surfaces lacquered with lustrous colours to augment their seductive power. Percival (2009) and Ceejay (2011), for example, engage the viewer more directly – their contours and polished bronze skins informing a sense of immediacy and presence.

The exhibition also illustrates Price’s extraordinary draftsmanship, in works on paper such as 100 Foot Sculpture in Isolation (2007), Nature Study (2007) and Two Hermits (2006), which maintain a sculptural vocabulary across one dimension. There is a seamless gradation between Price’s sculpture and drawing: both enveloped by the world he has created, an ethereal land that is both familiar and fantasy. Drawing was always a central component of Price’s work: “For me drawing is really flexible, and I use it in different ways. It’s my way of developing ideas”. Many of his 1960s works on paper explore ideas for developing abstract sculptures, while others envision impossible objects. Following his move to New Mexico in the early 2000s, wilder landscapes began to appear in his drawings, flowing with erupting volcanoes, cyclonic skies, and turbulent seas. Unstable Ground (2006) presents an atmosphere of heightened drama reflecting both the influence of the landscape and a deepening engagement with narrative.

About Lisson Gallery

Lisson Gallery is one of the most influential and longest-running international contemporary art galleries in the world. Today the gallery supports and promotes the work of more than 70 international artists across spaces in London, New York, Los Angeles and Shanghai. Established in 1967 by Nicholas Logsdail, Lisson Gallery pioneered the early careers of important Minimal and Conceptual artists such as Art & Language, Carl Andre, Daniel Buren, Donald Judd, John Latham, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long and Robert Ryman among many others. It still works with many of these artists and others of that generation, from Carmen Herrera and Olga de Amaral to Hélio Oiticica and Lee Ufan. In its second decade the gallery introduced significant British sculptors to the public for the first time, including Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Anish Kapoor, Shirazeh Houshiary and Julian Opie. Since 2000, the gallery has gone on to represent many more leading international artists such as Marina Abramović, Ai Weiwei, John Akomfrah, Leiko Ikemura, Liu Xiaodong, Otobong Nkanga, Pedro Reyes, Sean Scully, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Wael Shawky. It is also responsible for raising the international profile of a younger generation of artists including Dana Awartani, Cory Arcangel, Garrett Bradley, Ryan Gander, Josh Kline, Hugh Hayden, Haroon Mirza, Laure Prouvost and Cheyney Thompson.

Contact
contact@lissongallery.com

Lisson Gallery
27 Bell Street
London NW1 5BY
United Kingdom

Captions

• Installation views of ‘Ken Price’, 1 May – 25 July 2026 © Ken Price Estate; Courtesy Lisson Gallery
• Ken Price, Crook, 2002, Fired and painted clay, 39 x 30 x 25 cm / 15 3/8 x 11 3/4 x 9 7/8 in © Ken Price Estate; Courtesy Lisson Gallery
• Ken Price, Itself, 2003, Fired and painted clay, 15 x 20 x 14 cm / 5 7/8 x 7 7/8 x 5 1/2 in © Ken Price Estate; Courtesy Lisson Gallery
• Ken Price, NeGrum, 1994, Fired and painted clay, 35 x 38 x 31 cm / 13 3/4 x 15 x 12 1/4 in © Ken Price Estate; Courtesy Lisson Gallery
• Ken Price, Bloop, 2009, Fired and painted clay, Part 1: 15 x 16 x 10 cm / 5 7/8 x 6 1/4 x 3 7/8 in; Part 2: 15 x 11 x 10 cm / 5 7/8 x 4 3/8 x 3 7/8 in © Ken Price Estate; Courtesy Lisson Gallery
• Ken Price, Nicabar, 2007, Fired and painted clay, 13 x 15 x 22 cm / 5 1/8 x 5 7/8 x 8 5/8 in © Ken Price Estate; Courtesy Lisson Gallery
• Ken Price, Over, 2010, Fired and painted clay, 33 x 29 x 46 cm / 13 x 11 3/8 x 18 1/8 in © Ken Price Estate; Courtesy Lisson Gallery
• Ken Price, Sweet Cakes, 2002, Fired and painted clay, 19 x 19 x 23 cm / 7 1/2 x 7 1/2 x 9 in © Ken Price Estate; Courtesy Lisson Gallery
• Ken Price, Untitled, 1996-2011, Fired and painted clay, 46 x 43 x 41 cm / 18 1/8 x 16 7/8 x 16 1/8 in © Ken Price Estate; Courtesy Lisson Gallery
• Ken Price, Vernon, 2009, Fired and painted clay, 13 x 34 x 25 cm / 5 1/8 x 13 3/8 x 9 7/8 in © Ken Price Estate; Courtesy Lisson Gallery

Shaping Clay: Women artists in contemporary Japanese ceramics at Dai Ichi Arts, New York

May 21 – June 4, 2026

Dai Ichi Arts is pleased to present a summer group exhibition presenting contemporary women artists working in the ceramic medium, presenting new works by prominent and established artists alongside new rising voices in the landscape of Japanese ceramic art.

Since the 1950s, ceramic artists in Japan have gained increasing recognition, with many devoting themselves entirely to the medium through studio pottery practices, and the craft cultures of Shokunin (職人). For centuries, however, the field of ceramics in Japan remained overwhelmingly male-dominated, and women were largely excluded from key aspects of production. Often ingrained Shinto beliefs surrounding ritual impurity, alongside cultural systems of hereditary apprenticeship and succession, prohibited women from tasks such as kiln firing, limited their participation within traditional ceramic communities, with historically celebrated exceptions.

Meaningful change did not emerge until the post-war period from the 1960s. While women had historically been confined to decorative roles, the decades following the Second World War opened new possibilities for artistic and professional independence. Female ceramists began to challenge established conventions, moving beyond utilitarian and decorative traditions to pioneer sculptural, abstract, and avant-garde approaches to clay. Since then, and alongside the increasing admittance of co-ed university education in Japan during the postwar period, generations of women artists have transformed the landscape of contemporary Japanese ceramics, using clay as a powerful vehicle for artistic experimentation, personal expression, and critical inquiry.

Building upon this dialogue through the current presentations of Radical Clay—a traveling U.S. exhibition highlighting Japanese women artists working in ceramics from the celebrated Carol and Jeffrey Horvitz Collection of contemporary Japanese ceramics—this exhibition continues and expands that conversation. Alongside new works by artists associated with Radical Clay, the exhibition introduces established, emerging and innovative voices whose practices are reshaping the landscape of contemporary Japanese ceramics today.

Exhibiting artists: HIRUMA Kazuyo 昼馬 和代, KATO Mami 加藤 真美, KATSUMATA Chieko 勝間田 千恵子, KITAMURA Junko 北村 純子, KOIKE Shoko 小池 頌子, KOYAMA Atsuko 小山 厚子, MATSUDA Yuriko 松田 百合子, OISHI Sayaka 大石 早矢香, SHIGEMATSU Ayumi 重松 あゆみ, SHINGU Sayaka 新宮 さやか, TANAKA Yu 田中 悠, TASHIMA Etsuko 田嶋 悦子, TSUJI Kyo 辻 協, USAMI Shuri 宇佐美 朱理

Contact
info@daiichiarts.com

Dai Ichi Arts Ltd.
18 East 64th Street, Suite 1F
New York, NY 10065
United States

Photography by Yoriko Kuzumi

Captions

• Oishi Sayaka 大石 早矢香, ANIMA bowl (Lion), 2024, accompanied with a signed wood box, stoneware, 6 1/4 × 7 7/8 × 5 1/2 in. (16 × 20 × 14 cm)
• Tanaka Yu 田中 悠, Tsutsumimono, 2018, stoneware with matte glaze, 13 3/4 × 16 1/4 × 16 1/4 in. (34.9 × 41.3 × 41.3 cm)
• Usami Shuri 宇佐美 朱理, Sculpture, TOWA 2, 2026, accompanied with a signed wood plate, stoneware, 16 1/8 × 13 in. (41 × 33 cm)
• Shigematsu Ayumi 重松 あゆみ, Sculpture, Jomon spiral, 2015, stoneware, 14.5 × 12.5 × 13.9 in. (37 × 32 × 35.5 cm)
• Tashima Etsuko 田嶋 悦子, Cornucopia 09-Y12, 2009, stoneware and glass, 8 3/5 × 16 1/2 × 14 1/10 in. (22 × 42 × 36 cm)
• Katsumata Chieko 勝間田 千恵子, (Untitled) biomorphic sculpture, 2011, accompanied with a signed wooden box, glazed stoneware encrusted with chamotte (crushed fired porcelain), 9 1/2 in. (24 cm)
• Shingu Sayaka 新宮 さやか, “Calyx” bowl, with signed wood box, mixed clay with glaze slip, 4 1/8 × 5 3/8 in. (10.4 × 13.7 cm)
• Koike Shoko 小池 頌子, Shell-shaped lidded vessel with white glaze, 1992, accompanied with a signed wood box, stoneware, 11 1/8 × 10 1/8 in. (28.2 × 25.6 cm)
• Kitamura Junko 北村 純子, Flower jar, accompanied with a signed wood box, stoneware, 7 1/2 × 6 1/2 in. (19.1 × 16.5 cm)

Claire Curneen: Between my finger and my thumb is on view at Ruthin Craft Centre, Ruthin

March 28 – June 28, 2026

‘Between my finger and my thumb’: the first line of Seamus Heaney’s poem Digging perhaps evokes the sensuous squeezing of clay in the artist’s hands, but, as Claire points out, this is a nod to creative labour more broadly, the idea taking form through physical effort. Claire pinches clay as Heaney digs with his ‘squat pen’, poetic labour connecting hand and head.

For Claire, physical technique and the act of making are crucial. Her training as a potter – learning glaze technology and how materials behave, a kind of education that is dying – makes her work as a sculptor unique. Hand-building creates a physical relationship with an object as you move around it. ‘The way I make something is so important because I make it like I make a pot … I can’t make it any other way.’

For this reason, age-old ceramic metaphors resonate strongly for Claire: the clay vessel as a body (with its neck, lip, belly, foot) and the body as a vessel. What her figures contain – doubt, resilience, anguish, ecstasy – is as important as what we see.

Slightly paradoxically, then, Ancient Plaything is ‘the only pot I’ve ever made.’ Its title comes from the Guwan Tu (‘Pictures of Ancient Playthings’), a series of scroll paintings commissioned in 1729 by China’s Yongzheng emperor to depict a personal arrangement of artworks. This tall porcelain pot, with elongated gourd-like neck, flowers and stems modelled in relief and painted in blue and lustre, and two birds on the rim facing each other, expresses Claire’s feeling that her figures are ‘like Chinese blue and white pots.’ ‘Like’: with no base and its body modelled as a head, it is not literally a pot.

Claire wants her work to be seen as ‘a spectacle of making’. The interiority of her figures is expressed through ceramic technique: the textures of hand-building, painted and printed motifs, gold lustre like precious blood, glazes clear like tears or opaque with tin oxide. It is important to understand how a piece is made. To fit Claire’s kiln, Piercing the Heart has been made in two parts – like a magician’s assistant sawn in half, we joked: ‘how did they do that?’ ‘Craft is a belief system,’ says Claire, ‘we trust in it and there is a magic in it.’

Piercing the Heart alludes to Bernini’s The Ecstasy of St Teresa and, with a spouting branch, to the myth of Daphne. This reclining female figure is blanketed in richly modelled flowers: ‘a blooming eruption that consumes, only for it to be short-lived. But in ceramics you can keep it.’ Tin glaze disguises the red terracotta beneath; it softens the painted blue pigment and recedes at edges to define flowers and fingers, slanted rocks and soulful eyes.

Claire loves how tin-glazed terracotta differs from the porcelain she is best known for, its unpredictable effects, its more demotic connotations. Siren, a bird with a woman’s face, sings alluringly on a rocky base: the thinning tin glaze beautifully describes the texture of her feathers. So too the taut claws of the bird figure Angel.

Systems of belief are ‘beautiful things’, says Claire, though she recognises that religions can do terrible things. In her hands, ancient myth and biblical stories still today excavate the most important questions posed by our existence – our vulnerability, our suffering, our inner life, the challenge of connecting with others. Claire’s work may strike us as lonely or sad, but ‘we are all alone at the end’, she says, and insists it is not sad. Rather, it is reflective, contemplative, brave. She is refreshingly honest about happiness, admitting to not always being happy and not understanding why many think the pursuit of happiness is essential.

The introspective character of Claire’s figures makes Welcome Stranger a surprise. It is ‘quite blingy – not what I do’, she says. Named after the huge gold nugget discovered in Australia in 1869, this standing terracotta figure is covered in gold lustre from head to toe. In the Empty Tomb figures, we see how Claire uses gold lustre to suggest a figure’s internal life, bleeding to the surface or remaining within. In Welcome Stranger, this interiority has become the whole of the figure’s exterior in what seems a courageous gesture of openness, vulnerability, generosity, offering welcome or hoping for it. Claire cares about strangers. She has spoken about observing the quiet suffering of others and quoting it in her work.

Claire identifies with Nature Morte, a tin-glazed terracotta female head covered with modelled flowers, a ‘self-portrait of sorts’, but not literally. She welcomes the idea of people engaging with her own interiority but is not prescriptive about the ideas that her work embodies.

The invitation to exhibit in The Drawing Schools at Eton College from Master of Art and ceramics specialist Connor Coulston (and then in the main gallery at Ruthin Craft Centre) excites Claire with the opportunity in a large gallery to show works not as ceramics traditionally shelved and showcased en masse, as if given security in numbers, but away from the walls, isolated in space, each individual sculpture considered on its own terms. Not before time, given how the ‘fine art’ world has now embraced the ‘craft world’ and how curators have developed the confidence to show ceramics in this way. Her ideas call to mind the formal spatial arrangement of objects in the Guwan Tu.

Painted Tree, made in tin-glazed terracotta in two parts, is painted with raindrops. Placed on a low stand in the small courtyard outside Claire’s studio, it glints beautifully in sunshine and light rain. She plans to make a ‘grove’ of about five such trees. The idea relates to the theme of Daphne and of transformation, exploring the anthropomorphic qualities of trees and the association between branches and human hands. When trees shake, Claire says, they are like hands drawing attention. An experimental terracotta branch is alive with hands among its shoots, some splayed and reaching, others held together, more reticent. Another terracotta branch is modelled with hands at it tips, gold threads cascading from its ‘elbow’.

Claire talks of this work constituting ‘a memory of making’, returning to the earlier idea of a terracotta tree made in about 1999. Claire warns me not to over-intellectualise this. ‘The more I talk about my work, the more I undo it.’ She feels that she is now working more instinctively, working with a stock of ideas and experience – ‘the memory of making’ – that come to her increasingly naturally. She doesn’t like the art world’s ‘echo chamber’, grounding her practice in her family that pursues other interests, in social life, food and walking, in her students at Cardiff School of Art & Design who share personal things in extraordinary ways.

For her students, Claire is something of a counsellor, ‘making a difficult situation manageable’ by seeing art as ‘not just about me, but something bigger.’ Underpinning it all is her sense of good fortune in being able to do what she does and in what her work enables her to do – ask questions, indulge curiosity, explore emotions, make connections.

Text by Andrew Renton, commissioned by Ruthin Craft Centre. Andrew Renton is an applied art curator with a particular interest in ceramics. He worked at National Museums Liverpool (1993–1999) and at Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales (1999–2024) in the roles of Head of Applied Art, Keeper of Art and Head of Design Collections. At Amgueddfa Cymru he developed the collection of historic applied art and modern and contemporary craft and curated a series of exhibitions on craft and design. He has published research on historic Welsh ceramics and a wide range of other topics. Andrew is a Trustee of the Crafts Study Centre, University of the Creative Arts, Farnham; Nantgarw China Works Museum; and the Contemporary Art Society for Wales.

Contact
ruthincraftcentre@dll.co.uk

Ruthin Craft Centre
Park Road, Ruthin
Denbighshire, LL15 1BB
United Kingdom

Photos by Dewi Tannatt Lloyd

I have come to Andalucia to visit a stunningly visual exhibition, that combines ceramic works by two of Spain’s most eminent modern and contemporary artists — Pablo Picasso and Miquel Barceló — together with a selection of pottery from the archaeological collections of the Museo de Almería and the Museo de Cádiz. It opened in Almería, a Mediterranean city, in December last year and has now moved west, to Cádiz, a historical gateway to the Atlantic Ocean. Those lucky enough to visit this exhibition encounter an assemblage of clay-based pieces in which forces of continuity between past and present are mutually enveloped. Its co-curator, Miquel López-Ramiro, Artistic Director of the Museo Picasso in Málaga, has described to me how the exhibition “approaches ceramics not as an object but as a medium that traverses time. From Neolithic pieces to Picasso and Barceló, clay emerges as a material that preserves memory, gesture, and transformation.” Indeed, unlayering past into present, and memory into a rounded contingency with that which remains unfinished, this is an edgy, raw exhibition that communicates how clay, and its working, lies at the centre of human existence.

As a project it extends an idea first introduced by López-Ramiro and his colleagues at Museo Picasso in 2024, when works by Picasso were paired with those of Jeff Koons (link), in the context of the Alhambra Palace in Grenada. In this latest instantiation or ‘dialogic pairing’, the process of ‘reflection’ is brought to life in a multiplicity of ways, including adaptations in the display of the material in the venues, with López-Ramiro co-curating the exhibition together with Tania Fábrega, director, Museo de Almería; and Laura Esparragosa, director, Museo de Cádiz. As López-Ramiro has stated, the movement between venues facilitated:

a change in the interpretation of the project: from the stratigraphic depths of the Mediterranean to the openness of the Atlantic as a space of circulation and encounter. In Almería, the Mediterranean appears as a space of cultural sedimentation, of continuity In Cádiz, the Atlantic introduces notions of openness, displacement, and crossing. Two geographies, two ways of relating to material, that allow us to understand ceramics not only as origin, but also as transit.

In this way, the exhibition is configured as a system of reflections, not in the sense of reproduction but as a movement of repetition and difference, where past, present and possible futures come together on a single surface. In Almeria the relationship with a depth of time was fundamental, but in Cádiz, the interpretive axis shifts. It moves not so much toward origins as toward transit. Ceramics cease to function merely as vestiges and become objects in motion. The exhibition does not change in its conceptual core, but its breathing does.

Meanwhile, both museums have each contributed ten works shown in each venue, respectively, contributing to the sense of difference with repetition to which López-Ramiro is referring. In Almería, deft use of light and shadow amplified a sense of epiphaneous interplay between the exhibition’s different elements, that appeared to rise up in front of the exhibition viewer like a dramatis personae. The presentation in Cádiz invites us primarily to look down, as if giving us a historical overview of the interconnections between ceramics from very different periods; Ramiro speaks of the lower, large table, there as being like a shoreline, on which various objects have been stranded.

Of over a hundred objects on display, fifty-eight are by Barceló and thirty-eight are by Picasso. Several of the latter are rarely-seen items from the personal collection of Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, whose Foundation (link) has been a key supporter of the ‘Reflections’ series. He tells us at the preview of the residual force of influence on his grandfather throughout his life of his exposure in boyhood to a Mediterranean cultural iconography. Picasso lived from his birth in Málaga in 1881 until the age of ten.

The thirty seven works by Picasso in the exhibition were made at the Madoura Pottery in Vallauris in the south of France the 1950s and 1960s. He created thousands of works there from the mid-1940s onwards, glazing and painting both on standardised forms on fragments of pottery discarded in the workshop. This sense of playful discovery and a levelling out beyond high art to something more collectivist, finds its way also into how the exhibition display in both Almería and Cadiz museums is organised.

Linking things together, moreover, is a sense of liveness infusing Barceló’s practice. His works here, as the co-curators observe, “bear the marks of the physical process, becoming living surfaces that retain the energy of the moment”.

Born in Mallorca, in 1957, Barceló is an artist whose works generally have a heightened contemporaneity, combined with an elemental earthiness, evident in works in various media, from performance to painting, from sculptural installations to a style of ceramics that conveys a sense of disrupted interference with notions of finitude or completion. This is here brought into exciting juxtaposition both with lesser-known aspects of Picasso’s postwar ceramics and with astonishing examples of works from the Phoenician, Bronze, Iron, Roman and Middle Ages, all held together with a curatorial vision that celebrates –- in anti-hierarchical fashion — the powerful intimacies of relation that the practice of pottery has carried over generations.

López-Ramiro has commented also on why it seemed appropriate to bring these two artists together, speaking of their meeting point in the finding “in ceramics a space of freedom. For Picasso, it is a domain where painting, sculpture, and object come together. For Barceló, it is a physical, almost corporeal territory, where gesture becomes inscribed in the material itself. What they share is a direct relationship with matter—clay as language—and a capacity to transform the everyday into the symbolic.”

On the eve of the exhibition opening at the Museo de Almería, I sit down with Barceló, who first gained international attention when included in the Biennal in São Paulo in 1981, as well as in documenta 7 in Kassel in the following year. Whilst this drew him out of the shadows, he recalls in our interview, “I was a young artist and my work for many years had been ignored”. He draws a parallel with ceramics, that for a long time were viewed “as not fancy at all” but have recently come into fashion. At the same time, as Barceló tells me, ceramics “have always been there”.

From the 1980s into the 1990s, Barceló became known for his cultural nomadism, moving to live in various different places, whilst retaining homes in Mallorca and Paris, absorbing different landscapes and diverse cultural influences. He was at the same time morphing these together with his own engrained sense of relation to elemental dimensions of his Mallorcan childhood as well as a sense of relation to the longer history of Spanish figurative painting.

Melding all of this together into an original metier, Barceló’s practice is characterised by a sense of provisionality and openness and with tactility of texture. These too are qualities that find various forms in what is on show in both venues, where human images reduced to the bare essentials of mask-like forms are aligned with 3D constructs that lack specific functional uses, being distorted with respect to lines and angles.

The first word that Barceló uses when we commence our interview is ‘fragments”. He notes too that for him, “ceramics is transversal”. He then tells me hat during the process of the installation of the exhibition at the Museo de Almería, they had extemporised the creation of a Nativity scene from gathering together pieces found within the museum’s basement storehouse of archaeological artefacts and linking this to a series of fragments and small works of his own (many of which he had fired in the previous week), whilst adding also into this scenography some small pieces by Picasso. What came out of this was an assemblage speaking directly to an important moment in the Andalucian cultural and liturgical calendar. Barceló refers to the ‘crib’ installation with its emphasis on birth, as setting the thematic scene for the exhibition more broadly.

He points too to the congruence in style and symbol of three bulls that appear in the installation, one is from the 5th century, another was made by Picasso in 1957, and a third, was made by Barceló in 2009. He observes “each look like a variation of the same thing, but there are five thousand years of difference between them”. He describes the “same process”, of “hand, fingers and clay” at work in all three and speculates on what might happen if “a volcano” suddenly occurred and then someone in five thousand years’ time found these pieces all together. Might they then seem to have made by the same artist? And what of ideas of modernity then? The clay fragments might survive but what of notions of singular artistic identity?

Barceló’s initiation into working with clay is critical to this sensibility. He was first introduced when living in Mali in West Africa in the early 1990s: “I began to do ceramics for the first time there. It was fascinating. In the beginning it was for me something new, the clay, because I was a painter. But I couldn’t work outdoors because of the wind which was there every day during the Harmattan season”.

Instead, he was invited by female members of the local Dogon community to learn the low-fired, unglazed, hand-coiled methods they use in the production of earthenware pottery, carrying on traditional techniques honed over centuries. He tells me how:

Three generations of women showed me the processes, the grandmother, the mother and the daughters. They showed me first how to choose the clay from the right place, which was very far away; it was not easy to walk to the right place, and there were three different types, including yellow and white. And they showed me how to prepare the clay, it was a long process and then how to ‘cook’ it. Even now, I remember all the names in Dogon. I was shown also how to polish until it is glossy. It was fascinating. For me in the beginning it was something new….I was a painter, but I realised that the clay was the key to something.

When I eventually came back to Europe, I was in my village in Mallorca, it was still the beginning of the 1990s. I realised that there was an old man still working in a pottery studio there, in the same way as they had in the old days, in the 1950s. It was the last of that generation and so I worked with him for a year. After the Dogon, it was actually like modernity, we were working with electricity, we had an electric oven.

I observe that I find it fascinating that the wind was in a sense the force behind this shift in his own direction, as his paintings from before the 1990s appear to me convey a sense of the wind blowing through them:

Yes I think it is the same mood, impulse, probably. I have felt like I wanted to work directly with the earth and to give this volume. Something metaphysical. I was invited around the turn of the century to develop a major work for the Cathedral in Palma (link), and I realized that, for me, it is always about a desire to work both from the inside and the outside together. I began to imagine big walls in clay that I could then work behind, which is something I could not do with painting. I discovered a young ceramicist in Italy who could do this work with me (link). It was very exciting. It allowed me to work at a larger scale, where I am still doing the same thing, but projects are bigger whilst the technicity is getting better because the projects are larger. At the moment I am I am discussing taking on a commission to do something related, which would be a gigantic ceramic. I think probably it would be ten years work at least.

Meanwhile, all the recent works being shown by Barceló in the exhibitions are ‘sem titulo’, a factor that he attributes, when I ask him, to their having been recently made: “Yes, all my new works are untitled, because they just new, it is too much work to also put titles. I just add titles when the work goes to the gallery, or to the market”.

I then ask Barceló about something I heard him say in an interview with a German magazine in 2024, to the effect that in terms of his process, he takes the view that ‘knowledge’ can only come afterwards. I wanted to know more:

Yes, of course, well I always have the feeling that I have to find the technique for the precise thing that I might be about to take on. The more you know the more you can do things. It is a kind of invention. It is a thing I have never done before. I remember during the 1980s Documenta everything seemed very very new but now people are turning back to the pre-historic, to me there seems to be a big excitement around the big caves.

So do you think that the old is now the new new?

I have this feeling very much. For me the biggest excitement in art is connected to this sense in which we are becoming more aware of what has gone before. I am increasingly astonished by this. I think I didn’t see this earlier, or I was not able to absorb. Now I can see. It is like a humility, right? We always believe we are the first until we realise we are part of something else. Even our own histories.

Might it be something to do with a feeling like we are living in an Artificial Age and we are all possibly feeling the need for stone again?

Probably yes, and ceramics, the clay, it is in the Bible, humans were made with clay. I think nothing is more human than the clay. When I was in China, or Japan, or Africa, it was there, the clay is everywhere. I went to spend time in the Himalayas, ten or fifteen years ago, as it was becoming difficult politically to go to Mali, and I wanted to try to something with the intensity of the Dogon, and I was in the monastery and I was asking questions of the monk. He told me it was or is the same thing to paint or to pray, the root of the word is the same, so too to make a poem, it has the same spirit. I understand that.

I also realise that everything I am doing now I tried before, when I was ten or twelve years old, when I was just a little boy. I think this exhibition is very much about Andalucia, it is very Iberic, very local in a way. We are also very local. Picasso was very universal but I think the roots of what he was doing are very much in Andalucia. I think you can find them all around. I think it is cultural identity. It is not the purpose of the exhibition, but I have realized, talking to you, that this is, in the end, what the exhibition is telling us.

Bronaċ Ferran is an art writer, curator, and Research Associate at NCACE, School of Advanced Study, University of London.

Reflections. Picasso × Barceló forms part of the series of exhibitions by Museo Picasso Málaga, in collaboration with Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso (FABA) and the Andalusian Regional Government. After its presentation at the Museo de Almería between December 2025 and March 2026, the exhibition is on view at Museo de Cádiz through June 28, 2026.

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A previous version of this article incorrectly mentioned that Cádiz was the capital of Andalucia.

Twenty Thousand Years is on view at Galerie Fabian Lang, Zürich

March 5 – June 27, 2026

Featuring: Caroline Achaintre, Carl Anderson, Perrine Boudy, Gabi Deutsch, Sarah Dwyer, Clare Goodwin, Hippolyte Hentgen, Yulia Iosilzon, Guillaume Martin-Taton, Grayson Perry, Becky Tucker, Betty Woodman, Rita Zurbrügg

Oh, dear ceramics. You ware of the earth. You have something primal about you; you ground us. You feel like a deep breath of fresh Alpine air or like looking up from below into the crown of a thick tree trunk.

This is not an exhibition of historical antiquities, but perhaps a declaration of love. An exhibition about what today’s generation of artists can do with ceramics. Works that are equally virtuosic in terms of craftsmanship as they are in terms of artistry. Because that is precisely the crucial relationship. Nothing here is classical anymore, and yet the view on tradition plays a role for all artists here. We celebrate both how far the medium has come and how far one can go with it.

Everything made of ceramic is fragile, and yet it is the most long-lasting earth material that can be shaped by hand. Just think of the millennia-old ceramic treasures that we can still admire today in almost intact condition. It is one of the oldest means of artistic expression. Hundreds, thousands of years ago, our Palaeolithic ancestors must have noticed the material properties of clay. They must have seen the footprints of their prey – and their own heavy footsteps – pressed into the riverbanks, retaining their shape even when water collected in them. But there was still a long way to go before clay could be processed into ceramics.¹

Ceramics is a much broader concept than many might assume. It has long since emancipated itself from the ‘ceramics is just design’ pit. Interestingly, the first ceramic objects were not practical bowls, but works of art. Around 28,000 years ago, the Pavlovian culture of Gravettian Europe – a highly developed society of mammoth hunters – began using special clay kilns to fire small animal and human figures. Their most legendary work remains the Venus of Dolní Věstonice, a curvaceous figure considered to be the oldest known ceramic in the world.

Still until today, it is considered one of the most direct means of expression. Nearly all of the artists here in the exhibition spoke of the immediacy to the material in translating what they want to create. In today’s world, ceramics might even act therapeutic and keep us sane in the digital terror jungle. Philosophically, you can treat ceramics as this thing that turned against modernism.² Today, perhaps even as the thing that turns against digitalisation. Because, and this is also intrinsic to ceramics, you have to experience it. Images of the works shown here can never do justice to their surface texture, the reflections of light, their multi-sidedness and multi dimensionality.

If you leave aside the function of ceramics, what do you hold on to? From the exhibition catalogue of Hans Coper’s exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1969, he says: ‘Practising a craft with ambiguous reference to purpose and function, one has occasion to face absurdity. More than anything, somewhat like a demented piano-tuner, one is trying to approximate a phantom pitch.’ This is probably an apt description for what we find here in terms of virtuosity and ‘pitches’.

Perhaps the most radical artist working with ceramics, and an inspiration to many of the artists featured here, is the late Betty Woodman (1930–2018, USA). Betty’s ceramic practice shifted from the functional to the increasingly conceptual, drawing on the generous sculpturalism of Italian pottery for her Etruscan Vases works (1965-66) and – also on show – for her Pillow Pitchers (1970s-2000s), imbued too with the tradition of Chinese ceramic pillows, gloriously unwieldy in Betty’s reinterpretation. It was a time of ‘broadening my understanding of what clay could be’, said Betty, an early foretelling of her radical ceramic and painting assemblages, such as Summer View, (2014), which is on view in the exhibition: a protruding trompe l’oeil tabletop inhabited by spliced clay vessels.³

The artist Perrine Boudy (born in Versailles in 1995) is, by her own admission, a great admirer of Woodman. Her creations are also sculptures and should not really be understood as vases. They are inspired by Greco-Roman krater vases, but are unglazed and porous, and therefore unusable. She prefers not to be surprised by the colours of the glaze after firing and instead plays with engobes, which she uses ‘like aquarelle paints or ink’ before firing the piece in a single pass. The vase thus becomes three-dimensional paper. Drawing transformed into volume, striving to play with the boundary between drawing and ceramics. Boudy uses the vehicle of vases, which are charged with meaning and are ingrained in all our memories as irrefutable cultural heritage, and, in the spirit of a simulacrum, transforms them into a platform on which one can play around at will. Omage and transfigured comic drawing at the same time. She makes use of obsessively recurring motifs such as dots, volutes and stripes, purely ornamental, or comic book-like animals such as horses or dogs.

Caroline Achaintre (born 1969 in Toulouse, France / lives and works in London, UK) also toys with two- and three-dimensionality. She creates various characters, half fantastical, half ghostly, sometimes made of wool, sometimes of ceramic, in different dimensions. Solaroid appears like a carnival mask dazzled by the sun. In general, the European carnival, with its shape-shifting, plays an important role as a source of inspiration for Achaintre. The sun forces a squinting of the eye area and shrinks the ceramic sheet into a three-dimensional mask. Something that was originally two-dimensional becomes something animated and three-dimensional. Achaintres’ thought experiment perhaps goes even a step further, one might think: don’t you suddenly see things you didn’t see before when you yourselves squint your eyes and focus on a blurred spot?

For Sarah Dwyer (born 1974 in Ireland. Lives and works in London, UK), everything begins with drawing, but first on paper. Starting with life drawings, she reworks her life figures on canvas again and again, reducing them, stretching them lengthwise or widthwise, or squashing them together, until they have the right shape. For this, she uses her own abstract vocabulary of mark-making, which she has developed over a period of fifteen years, with a wink to the history of abstract figuration. Recently, she has been transferring the discourse she developed in painting to experimental ceramic sculptures. Between figuration and abstraction, her exploration of the nature of the gestural sign, the line, continues. The sculptures are like physical three-dimensional manifestations of brushstrokes. What is astonishing is how spontaneous and free they appear, completely concealing the fact that they have been so carefully layered and fired so many times to achieve the different surface textures, until just before the heat in the kiln would break them.

Like Dwyer, Gabi Deutsch (born 1973. Lives and works in Zurich, CH) explores forms of abstraction and translations into three-dimensional sculpture in her work. She probes the potential of the material, its structure and its possibilities for transformation, making the nature of the process visible. Forms from the history of architecture, art and design serve as references for her work. Deutsch has been working mainly with ceramics for several years. She creates hand-formed unique pieces that are situated between works of art and functional design objects.

As the only self-confessed designer in the group, Rita Zurbrügg comes very close to the boundary between the supposedly different worlds of art and design. As impressively artistic as they are, there should no longer be any distinction between the two. Also inspired by architecture, visual arts and the diversity of forms found in nature, Zurbrügg transforms clay into masterful sculptural objects for everyday use.

Since 2018, Guillaume Martin-Taton (born 1991 in Nîmes, FR. Lives and works in Geneva, CH) has been developing a ceramic practice in which chimera-like animals play a central role. These hybrid figures, which emerged from his research into signage systems and the Manitou alphabet, function as three-dimensional signs – simultaneously sculptural forms and coded presences. Drawing on aposematism and the visual warning strategies of the animal kingdom, he composes surfaces characterised by strong contrasts, rhythmic patterns and symbolic motifs. These creatures, which lie somewhere between artefact and totem, embody a language in which colour, ornament and volume serve as signals. Through them, ceramics become a space in which the sign detaches itself from the wall, takes on volume and transforms into a living, ambiguous figure – archaic and contemporary at the same time.

Becky Tucker‘s (born 1993 in Scarborough, UK. Lives and works in Glasgow, UK) shape- and genre-transcending sculptures and reliefs explore the intersection between ceramic tradition, cultural symbolism and the emotional intensity of contemporary cultural Angst. Her latest work, Hyetal, addresses the revered awe towards water and floods, an overwhelming, unstoppable force. It builds on the long tradition of rain/water deities and folkloric spirits. From the Greek Hyades – nymphs who bring rain – to Oya, the goddess of violent rainstorms in Yoruba mythology, to the Kelpies – malevolent water spirits in Scottish folklore. The figure stretches upwards towards the rain and downwards towards the earth – in searching. The barely human figure is ambiguous in terms of gender and age; it is unclear what is costume and what is skin. She sits there, seemingly oblivious, except for her six eternally open eyes.

As already mentioned, ceramics have been attributed with a kind of healing effect. This may be due to the immediately fulfilling haptic qualities of clay and the variety of possibilities it offers. Carl Anderson (born 1990 in Shoreham-by-Sea, UK. Lives and works in West Sussex, UK) regards ceramics as a form of trauma therapy. A rather serious trauma that he has to cope with. Anderson was the victim of a knife attack that nearly cost him his life. His series ‘Spoon Warmer’ shows various grinning trolls whose protruding ‘head world’ forms a mysterious arm that hides an object or a hand signal behind their backs. Their grin is intended to distract from the secret code, but at the same time arouses suspicion about their true intentions. The title and the comic-like, playful appearance of the now obsolete spoon warmer play with the feeling of feel-good domesticity, while the sculpture tells of hidden threat and deception. A tense dialogue emerges between harm and care, digital and physical, violence and safeguarding, absurdity and seriousness. Anderson questions what can still be trusted in today’s world.

Clare Goodwin‘s (born 1973 in Birmingham, UK. Lives and works in Zurich, CH) ceramic works are an extension of her painting practice. With them, she challenges her own paintings on canvas, which are rooted in hard-edge abstraction. Glaze becomes colour field and line, blurring the hard structures of her paintings and introducing a softer, tactile, architectural presence between object, surface and image. Sometimes she also breaks up the forms and reassembles them like a mosaic. In doing so, Goodwin introduces a pattern-based colour scheme that reflects personal and found objects with abstract representations of domestic interiors. A quiet beauty emerges, a kind of ‘constructive nostalgia’ that allows geometric fragments and muted colour relationships to integrate between painting, tile and object.

Yulia Iosilzon‘s (born 1992 in Moscow, RU. Lives and works in London, UK) work also straddles the boundary between painting, ceramics and world-building, and likewise consists of mosaic fragments. Less tied to abstraction than Goodwin, and more to figurativeness, Iosilzon merges narrative and ornament into a single pictorial logic. They transport the viewer into landscapes that appear both mythical and interior. Iosilzon deepens her exploration of translucency and fluidity—qualities that extend beyond the material surface into the architecture of her compositions. These new ceramic paintings open a dialogue between the personal and the cosmic, between the remembered structures of mythology and the instability of contemporary experience. The visual language unfolds through a series of scenes in which human and natural forms are intertwined, creating moments of transformation. Through this ongoing tension between disintegration and creation, Iosilzon transforms inherited symbolic narratives into psychological dramas full of ambiguities. The mythical no longer dictates moral consequences, but provides a framework for exploring porous identities, shifting emotional states, and the generative instability between form and feeling.

The Tribu series by artist duo Hippolyte Hentgen (Gaëlle Hippolyte born 1977 in Perpignan, FR. Lina Hentgen born 1980 in Clermont-Ferrand, FR. Live and work in Paris, FR) ties in with the tradition of the objet trouvé and is perhaps the third strand in the field of mosaic creations. Originally conceived at the invitation of the Cristallerie Saint Louis Museum (Hermès Foundation) in Saint Louis les Bitches, France, the duo worked with remnants from the Cristallerie that revealed imperfections in the crystal. Each sculpture was an assemblage of crystal elements, objects found at flea markets and cut-out images. In the case of Tribu here, all the elements consist of ceramic objects found at flea markets. These sculptures function like rebuses. As in collages, analogies or connections between new ideas arise through the association of the visible and hidden original history of the objects used.

The sculpture is combined with one of the artists’ latest drawings from the ‘Patterns’ series. The Patterns are based on fragments or close-ups of elements from Italian Renaissance paintings, combined with abstract motifs resembling fabric patterns, just like Goodman’s work. A postmodern pop effect is achieved by using art history to address and change the discussion about representation.

British artist Grayson Perry (born 1960 in Chelmsford, UK. Lives and works in London, UK), winner of the 2003 Turner Prize, creates, among others, enchantingly beautiful pots, hand-sewn quilts and extravagant clothing designs that convey provocative themes. At the heart of his work is a passionate desire to comment on profound injustices in society. Perry uses pots as a narrative and figurative medium, as a round, curved surface for bizarre or bitter stories. In the richly textured work Untitled (1992), the sentence “Are not murder, pollution, perversion and all forms of evil natural as well? appears alongside photo transfers of an innocent horse, cute dogs, hands praying to God and an engraving of a king and his mistress, both naked. The king has grown breasts, he has a pregnant belly and has to stand on platform shoes to be at least as tall as his much younger lover with her iron corset. Need we say more?

Contact
info@fabianlang.ch

Galerie Fabian Lang
Obere Zäune 12
8001 Zürich
Switzerland

Captions

• Installation views of twenty thousand years, 2026, Galerie Fabian Lang, Zurich, CH. Copyright/credits: © The artists and Galerie Fabian Lang. Courtesy of the artists and Galerie Fabian Lang.
• Becky Tucker, Hyetal, 2026, Glazed stoneware and fabric, 180 x 57 x 40 cm, 70.87 x 22.44 x 15.75 in. Copyright/credits: © Becky Tucker. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Fabian Lang.
• Betty Woodman, Summer View, 2013, Glazed earthenware, epoxy resin, lacquer, acrylic paint, canvas and wood, 152.4 x 109.22 x 29.21 cm, 60 x 43 x 11.5 in. Copyright/credits: © Woodman Family Foundation. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery and the Woodman Family Foundation. Photo: Annik Wetter.
• Caroline Achaintre, Solaroid, 2019, Ceramic, 35 x 25 x 7 cm, 13.78 x 9.84 x 2.76 in. Copyright/credits: © Caroline Achaintre. Courtesy of the artist and von Bartha.
• Carl Anderson, Unzipped, 2025, Glazed stoneware, 39.5 x 16 x 23.5 cm, 15.55 x 6.3 x 9.25 in. Copyright/credits: © Carl Anderson. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Fabian Lang.
• Gabi Deutsch, Lamp (Your Power), 2024, Glazed ceramic, ink on polystyrene, 100 x 36 x 36 cm, 39.37 x 14.17 x 14.17 in. Copyright/credits: © Gabi Deutsch. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Fabian Lang.
• Grayson Perry, Untitled, c. 1992, Glazed ceramic, 46 x 21.5 x 21.5 cm, 18.11 x 8.46 x 8.46 in. Copyright/credits: © Grayson Perry. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro. Photo: Jack Hems.
• Hippolyte Hentgen, Series “Tribu”, 2025, Mixed media, 74 x 14 x 14 cm, 29.13 x 5.51 x 5.51 in. Copyright/credits: © Galerie Bernard Jordan. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Bernard Jordan.
• Perrine Boudy, Valet de cœur, 2024, Engobe on red earthenware, 69 x 47 x 53 cm, 27.17 x 18.5 x 20.87 in. Copyright/credits: © Perrine Boudy. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Fabian Lang.
• Rita Zurbrügg, Untitled, 2024, Ceramic, engobed and glazed, 21 x 24 x 13 cm, 8.27 x 9.45 x 5.12 in. Copyright/credits: © Rita Zurbrügg. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Fabian Lang.
• Clare Goodwin, Ceramic Whisper/Still Scape, 2026, Hand cut/Hand glazed ceramic, Left: 30 x 21 cm, 11.81 x 8.27 in., Right: 33 x 25 cm, 12.99 x 9.84 in. Copyright/credits: © Clare Goodwin. Courtesy of the artist and Lullin + Ferrari.
• Guillaume Martin-Taton, Krotok, 2024, Glazed earthenware, 37.5 x 27.5 x 31 cm, 14.76 x 10.83 x 12.2 in. Copyright/credits: © Guillaume Martin-Taton. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Fabian Lang.
• Sarah Dwyer, Hone-Onna, 2024, Glaze, engobe, earthenware, 37 x 32 x 23 cm, 14.57 x 12.6 x 9.06 in. Copyright/credits: © Sarah Dwyer. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Fabian Lang.
• Yulia Iosilzon, Reflections, 2026, Glazed stoneware on wood, 66 x 76 cm, 25.98 x 29.92 in. Copyright/credits: © Yulia Iosilzon. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Fabian Lang. Photo: Deniz Güzel.

“The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of the transformation”.¹

R. Solnit

Introduction

I am fascinated by stories that melt in the kiln with minerals and metal oxides in the thick viscosity of ceramic glazes and remain for centuries after cooling.

Since I started working in ceramics eighteen years ago, glaze has been at the heart of my practice. I have been interested in both the process of making it – learning to predict and influence the result – and the significance of the color of this vessel’s outer layer.

Ceramics has historically been woven as craft, with narratives about industry, technology, and nature. This triangle draws my attention because it conveys a romantic image of craftspeople resisting industry and healing the scars left by large-scale production on the environment. For my own reasons, I both submit to this romantic idea while at the same time, I strive to keep a peripheral and critical perspective on the ceramics of today’s reality. I think both those stories of resistance and critical perspectives are important to be told and re-told today.

My curious and creative investigations of nature/industry/technology triangle through ground minerals have intensified through the years of practice and teaching. It fostered both my deep knowledge of the matter and my writing practice. In my glaze and writing, I strive to maintain a close relationship with both the materials I work with and the stories I encounter along the way.

A year ago, I was selected for the project Vad Händer? (What is happening?) run by Folk&Form and the Konsthantverkcentrum. Each of the ten selected artists was invited to explore the archive of one museum in the region Västragötaland in Sweden and see what happens then.

The creative process of the ten craft artists selected for the project Vad Händer was on display at the Textile Museum of Borås (Sweden) until the 15th of March 2026.

In the list of the proposed museums to collaborate with in the project Vad Händer?, I was chosen to work with the Rörstrand Museum in Lidköping. Rörstrand is a Swedish porcelain factory. It started in 1726 in Stockholm before moving to Göteborg in 1926. It later moved to Lidköping, where production moved to Sri Lanka in 2007, leaving behind empty buildings, a museum, and its archives.

Chapter 1. When a color is dead.

Jenny, the curator of Rörstrand museum, has taken out a pile of notebooks. The small leather-covered books are displayed on a table in between the shelves of the archive, under the ground of the former porcelain factory area of Rörstrand in Lidköping. Neon bulbs lighten the place; it smells a mix of dust and light humidity.

With white cotton gloves, I quickly open one book and read through the pages. They are filled with handwritten recipes of glazes. All the recipes have titles like Grön matt; Glasyr J; Glasyr B; Tobakburk; Pink4, etc. Sometimes there are notes in the margins. Under the title, I can quickly recognize the familiar names of ingredients like Flusspat; Kaolin; Kvartz.

As Jenny told us that we would not stay long in the archive, I hastily took pictures of all the recipes I found interesting and that could potentially interest me in the future: the rose colors and several bases. Having securely saved the pictures on my camera, I leave the archive without yet knowing what I will do with them.

Some days later, looking back at my pictures, I notice that the notebooks have been written by the same man, Waldemar Lindström, from 1875 to 1937. W. Lindström has been the chief of the ceramic workshop at the Rörstrand factory in Göteborg.

The other thing I notice is the name of the ingredients: many glazes contain lead. This poisonous material was commonly used in glazes to produce vivid colors and transparent, shiny glazes. Some other poisonous materials are also mentioned, like Uranium or Kalium dichromate (K2Cr207). Fortunately, it is no longer used, but it makes most of the recipes I recorded unusable.

At this point, it sounds like none of the recipes can be used today. The knowledge and craftsmanship developed by this man, and for sure by a team of people working together at Rörstrand, seems to be lost: not usable anymore, and maybe for the best of our health, never again. It seems like the small leather notebooks golden at the edges of the pages are like graves for all those colors that will never exist anymore.

When is a glaze recipe lost? Were the recipes lost before I found them?

As Rebecca Solnit describes it², loss is a transformative journey: a before, when you know, and an after, when you don’t know. It is a state of mind in which you suddenly know you are lost: emptiness, loneliness, a need to find your way.

Those recipes have already made a journey from being used in a factory to being an archive in a cellar. Lost?

Chapter 2. When a color is calling to be reborn.

Can one say that being alive is changing and moving? The recipes recorded in the book have been moving and changing, maybe exchanged before being archived. Where are the bases J, S, B from? They certainly have been adapted, variated, and tested before being rewritten several times in the notebooks.

And then suddenly, the recipes were stuck. They stopped to change and to be exchanged. They are like lying in the notebook in the silence of death in the archive.

There is a transformative journey intrinsic to the glaze material from rocks to powders, and to glazeslip, and then to fired glass – a solid-liquid as it can be described; a non-crystallized form of crystals of rocks; a magnification of the white powders melted into bright colors. It is a matter that is transformed through mixing and firing. The result after firing is partially unknown, as I can only slowly, through a repeated process of mixing, firing, and observing, predict the results, even if never entirely.

What drives me forward in this research is precisely the unknown: the wish to find this state of not knowing, the wish to explore new areas where I don’t yet know the results, the wish to be lost so I can find new ways.

It was the same desire that pushed me to enter the archive of the Rörstrand factory: to enter an unknown place, be in this state of being lost, where I don’t know where I am and what I see, where to look. And then, eventually find my way, develop my own tools of finding in the labyrinth of archives.

I feel an urge to recompose myself and get out of a state of being lost. It is a matter of survival; no creation seems possible without knowing that I am lost.

The glaze is recomposing itself through the firing process; it is finding its own balance in between the material of the recipe: in the oxidation reaction that characterizes the type of firing I am driving in my studio, some atoms lose oxygen and because of this unbalanced state, they recompose with others to find a new balance. In this way, they reconnect with each other in new constellations and create texture, thickness, and colors. It is the trace of this intrinsic movement that is visible after the quick cooling down of the glaze after the end of the firing.

Chapter 3. When the color is reborn.

I designed a GlazeLab several years ago. It is a ceramic class for adults where, step by step, participants learn how to start mixing glaze. By mixing, observing, and analyzing together, they are learning from each other and beginning to find their own way in glaze creation.

In the GlazeLab I held during autumn 2025, I proposed that participants test together several recipes from W. Lindström’s book: I chose a few that did not include lead or other poisonous materials. We mixed several bases from the notebooks of W. Lindström (S, J, and B) with several oxide mixtures. After we got those first firing results, observed and analyzed them, we chose to continue with this recipe: J Matt Grön 4.

From this recipe, what I know is the title and a list of ingredients. What I don’t know is the firing temperature and firing atmosphere. Those are two essential elements of the glazes that can impact the results. (But how does it matter anyway, as I have no idea of the expected result of this recipe?) Something I do not know either is the expected result by W.Lindström. The only thing that helps me guess is the title of the glaze, which means “Green mat glaze” in Swedish. Lost in the unknown, we are like blind persons, cautiously going in the dark.

We decided with the participants to slightly adapt the recipe, decrease the amount of copper oxide to make it less metallic. The results of this second test have the lab participants enthusiastic. The glaze covers the piece well, does not run down onto the kiln and has a beautiful leopard dark marble surface on the green matt background. With one of the participants, we decided to mix a larger amount into 3 kilograms to glaze larger pieces.

Nevertheless, the first test of the larger amount of glazeslip is way less convincing. We are all tremendously disappointed. The green is pale, transparent, and full of many pinholes. At several places, there are large brown mat surfaces, as if all the copper oxide had fallen there. After reading some books and discussing with ceramicist colleagues, the dark spots seem to be due to the copper oxide, which tends to run down too quickly from the bucket when we dip the bisque-fired piece in it. This can be due to a lack of clay in the recipe. Those conclusions led to a series of new tests with deflocculant and bentonite.

As those tests are still on their way. From one firing to the next, with the participants in the lab, we are going through disappointment, curiosity, and discouragement, and gaining a better understanding of the material we use. Through this process, we are learning to make it our own: reach the desired color, learn how thick to apply it to the piece, maybe with other glazes on top, and how to make it fit the condition of the collective shared space of a school.

Each participant makes their own way to use it, to look at it.

Chapter 4. When a color is alive.

Glaze colors are calling to be born. Inside me, this creative impulse feels the right and only way to be followed.

Glaze recipes are, in themselves, collaborative creations. They come from a potter who received them from another potter (with varying degrees of consent). You got it, maybe, from someone else who did the same. Each person in this transmission chain has had the chance to adapt the recipe, maybe give it a new name.

The J base glaze from Rörstrand is made from a mix of quartz, kaolin, feldspar, chalk, and zinc oxide. This recipe is not unique. You can find those materials gathered in many other recipes in different balances. It means that it has been spread out from somewhere, transmitted, developed, created, re-created, until it has been archived underground at the former Rörstrand factory. Even in the book by W. Lindström, you can find this recipe rewritten several times, as if it needed to be recorded to continue being used.

Glaze recipes are alive when they change, when they are used, recreated and reimagined. They are alive when their colors become meaningful to someone’s creative desire. It feels strongly alive when, during the glazelab, it triggers happiness, curiosity, surprise, or disappointment. It feels alive when it cooperates or resists to fit the requirements of a given environment.

While mixing this recipe with the other people of the Glazelab, we were giving life back to a craftsman’s desire to create this recipe, a desire that had long been dormant. By adapting and recreating this recipe, it becomes possible for it to continue to be used, carrying its title and its history, and all the craft persons who have been collaborating through generations in its never-ending re-creation.

Anne-Marie Dehon is a ceramic artist based in Sweden, originally from Belgium. After earning a degree in political science, she studied ceramics with F. Urrejola (Lodève, FR) and painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (Brussels, BE). She worked as an artist in Brussels between 2012 and 2020, before moving to Sweden in 2020. She graduated from Hdk-Valand (Gothenburg, SE) in ceramic art and more recently from the Research Lab at Konstfack (Stockholm, SE). She is one of the co-founders of the Kollektiv Tontouristen.

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Captions

• Rorstrand archive. Photos © Anne-Marie Dehon
• Vad Händer at the Textile Museum of Borås, Sweden, 2026. Photos © Anna Sigge

Posted on May 15, 2026

The School of Art and Design at the University of Wisconsin-Stout invites qualified candidates to apply for the tenure-track position of Ceramics and Foundations Assistant Professor. As full-time faculty, responsibilities will include teaching all levels of ceramics and foundations, professional and academic research in the field of ceramics, university service and student mentorship.

The individual hired will be teaching introductory through advanced level ceramics. The candidate will demonstrate ceramic expertise in a broad definition, with the ability to teach wheel-throwing, ceramic sculptural techniques, and mold making. Candidates should also be willing to engage in interdisciplinary or digital processes. Expectations for this position also include studio management and maintenance, collaborative engagement with faculty both in the school and campus-wide, student worker supervision and teaching foundation courses in 3D Design, 2D Design, or drawing as qualified. Students vary from ceramic majors to all levels of art and design students, and other majors taking ceramics as a general education fulfillment.

The facilities are equipped with electric kilns, gas reduction kilns, and electric wheels, a slab roller, extruder, glaze room with a spray booth, and an advanced student work area. UW-Stout has an impressive ceramics facility, and the faculty is responsible for this area. These responsibilities include safety inspections, maintenance, electric and gas fueled reduction kiln firing, clay mixing, glaze mixing, ordering supplies, student worker supervision, and the mentoring of the student Ceramics Guild.

Primary expectations include teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels, creative research, and service to the University. Course delivery is in-person and in accordance with NASAD standards. This is a full-time, 9-month academic year position.

APPOINTMENT START DATE: August 17, 2026

QUALIFICATIONS

Minimum / Required
• Have completed MFA in Ceramics
• Evidence of potential for teaching excellence
• Experience teaching ceramics including creation and glazing at the college level
• Experience teaching one or more art foundation classes at the college level
• Ceramic studio management experience including glaze and clay mixing, gas and electric kiln operations.
• Expertise in two of the following with familiarity with all three: wheel-thrown pottery, sculptural hand building, mold making/slip casting techniques

Highly Desired/Preferred
• Active creative practice through a record of exhibitions, presentations, or other professional research activities
• Ability to utilize new and emerging digital technologies

Note: A terminal degree (M.F.A.) required for promotion to full professor, unless by special exception process.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Teach introductory through advanced level ceramics
• Teach foundations courses, such as 2D Design, 3D Design, or Drawing
• Lead Role in Ceramics Studio to include:
• • • Safety inspections
• • • Maintenance of electric and gas fueled reduction kiln firing
• • • Clay mixing and glaze mixing
• • • Ordering supplies
• • • Student worker supervision
• • • Mentoring of the student Ceramics Guild
• Conduct student academic advisement and conduct assessment of student learning. This includes contributing to academic program assessment, accreditation, and continuous improvement processes, in collaboration with faculty and staff.
• Maintain an active creative practice as a studio artist
• Participate in Department, School and/or University committees
• Foster a rigorous and inclusive learning environment
• Provide support to maintain a healthy and safe classroom environment, and perform other duties as designated by Chair.

DEPARTMENT INFORMATION

The School of Art & Design (SOAD) has over 85 faculty/staff and over 1,300 students, making it the largest public higher education art and design entity in the upper Midwest. The School of Art & Design student population accounts for 20% of the on-campus undergraduate population at UW-Stout. Our school serves the MFA in Design, ten undergraduate degrees, and seven minors. For more information, please visit: http://www.uwstout.edu/artdes/

APPLICATION INSTRUCTIONS

Applications received by end of day, 6/12/2026 are ensured full consideration. Applications submitted after 6/12/2026 may be reviewed at the discretion of the search committee.

Required application materials:
• Cover letter (* See below)
• Curriculum vitae or resume
• Names and contact information for a minimum of three (3) professional references who can speak to your skills and abilities for the position
• Professional portfolio, a PDF or a link to an online portfolio of up to 20 samples of professional/creative work.
• Teaching portfolio of student outcomes (if applicable), link or no more than 20 pages.
• Teaching philosophy (1-2 pages)

Please use your cover letter to speak to each of the Minimum/Required Qualifications for this position as listed above. For each required qualification, describe your relevant experience, using specific examples from your work history to illustrate how your experience satisfies the requirement.

For questions regarding this position or recruitment, please contact:
Search Chair: Aaron Durst
Email: dursta@uwstout.edu

If you need assistance with the online application process or if you submitted your application prior to uploading all the required application materials, please contact:

Search Coordinator: Rebecca Rother
Email: rotherr@uwstout.edu

Handmade, Rewritten: Ceramics in a Digital World

This May Maak presents ‘Contemporary Ceramics + Craft’, a curated sale of works by the leading names in studio ceramics, alongside important makers working in wood, glass, fibre and silver.

As Maak celebrates 15 years of auctions dedicated to contemporary ceramics and craft, the latest auction offers an opportunity to reflect on the significance of the handmade in an increasingly digital world. In a cultural moment shaped by screens, algorithms, and artificial intelligence, people are being drawn to tactile, materially grounded handmade objects with a renewed sense of urgency.

Across both the art market and wider culture, there is growing evidence of a shift, especially amongst younger collectors, towards the authenticity and individuality of one-of-a-kind objects that can be physically engaged with rather than simply viewed. This desire is often perceived as a reaction to digital saturation.

As a movement, studio ceramics has been exploring material and form for over a century and in doing so has long embodied these qualities. What feels newly relevant today is not the emergence of the material-based arts, but a renewed attention to its depth and complexity.

The Maak auction brings together a carefully considered selection of ceramic and craft disciplines that focus on materiality and reveal the maker’s hand. Rather than presenting a single narrative, the works in the sale reveal a field that is both deeply rooted and constantly evolving – one in which tradition, experimentation, and play exist side by side.

View the Contemporary Ceramics + Craft auction

The idea of ceramics standing in opposition to the dominant cultural forces of its time is not new. The narrative of 20th-century studio pottery, shaped by figures such as Bernard Leach (lots 6-12) and Michael Cardew (lots 36-39), was grounded in ideals of honesty, utility, and restraint, with handmade objects positioned as a moral and aesthetic counterpoint to industrialisation.

The foundations of the movement and subsequent exchange of ideas was itself slow and physical – rooted in travel, collaboration, and the movement of philosophies and objects across cultures. Leach’s time in Japan, and his return to St Ives with Hamada Shoji (lots 13-16) in 1920, established a dialogue between East and West that was embedded in making. Similarly, Cardew’s work in Abuja, Nigeria in the 1950s – where he worked alongside Ladi Kwali – demonstrates how techniques and traditions were adapted through direct, lived experience. Two works in the auction by Cardew (lot 39) and Kwali (lot 40) were each made in Abuja and demonstrate the fusion of the Eastern influenced stoneware techniques Cardew adopted from Leach with the indigenous pottery style of Abuja.

Set against today’s instant global connectivity, this earlier model of exchange feels markedly different. Yet the impulse remains the same: a desire to share knowledge through material practice.

Whilst the values and traditional techniques associated with Leach and Cardew have continued into the 21st century – as seen in the work of Richard Batterham (lots 43-47) and Jim Malone (lots 48-49) – they represent only one strand within a much broader field. The introduction of European modernism by émigré artists Lucie Rie (lots 52-64), Hans Coper (lots 65-68) and Ruth Duckworth (lots 74-75) expanded the possibilities of ceramics, opening it up to new formal and conceptual approaches. From this point, the discipline became increasingly diverse, experimental, and at times deliberately challenging. The qualities of the handmade in ceramics was no longer singular philosophy but an ongoing exploration.

The 1970s proved a particularly dynamic moment of experimentation and ongoing redefinition of the handmade. Artists associated with the ‘New Ceramics’ movement – Elizabeth Fritsch, Alison Britton, Jacqueline Poncelet and Carol McNicoll – challenged the conventions of studio pottery by blurring the boundaries between vessel-making, sculpture, and painting. Their work pushed ceramics beyond function and into a more conceptual and expressive territory. This shift is reflected in the auction, which includes a significant group of works by Elizabeth Fritsch, from her first solo exhibition in 1974 (lot 198) through the following three decades (lots 199–202), alongside works by Alison Britton (lot 203) and Carol McNicoll (lots 204-207).

For some artists, such as Ewen Henderson, the exploration was focused on pushing the material properties of clay to its limits over the course of his career. Where earlier forms (such as lots 108 and 109) still loosely reference traditional forms and techniques, later works (lots 111 and 117) demonstrate how forms were pushed to the edge of collapse, surfaces fractured or distorted, and glazes behave unpredictably. These works emphasise process rather than conceal it; they retain a sense of risk, even of failure. If the earlier studio tradition sought harmony, this approach embraced tension. Clay is not simply shaped—it is negotiated with.

By contrast, an artist like Duncan Ross has spent decades refining a single technique as seen in lot 193. Each iteration of his vessels introduce subtle adjustments in proportion, surface, or balance. The result is not repetition, but distillation – an accumulation of knowledge embedded in the hand. In an age that privileges speed and constant innovation, this kind of sustained attention offers a quiet resistance.

Within this environment of creative exploration and diversity, it is interesting to observe how artists define parameters for their own practice. For some, like John Ward (lots 150-163), this takes the form of self-imposed restraint. Ward would repeatedly revisit a core group of vessel forms, refining them through subtle variation whilst working within a deliberately limited palette of glazes and decorative devices. The immense appeal of John Ward’s pots to those who collect them is the warmth and tactile quality that comes from the way they engage with their physical environment. The geometric designs of his black and white pots – five of which have been selected for this auction – were inspired by the way shadows would fall on newly made pots in the studio. Ward’s work demonstrates how restriction can generate depth.

A similar commitment to restraint can be seen in the work of Edmund de Waal, whose practice is defined by an almost exclusive use of porcelain and a sustained focus on the cylinder form as seen in lots 262-272. Through subtle shifts in proportion, surface, and arrangement, de Waal transforms repetition into a form of enquiry. His work extends the language of the handmade beyond the individual object, situating it within carefully constructed installations like ‘not yet’, 2012 (lot 272) that engage with space, memory, and architecture. In doing so, it reflects a broader expansion of what ceramics can be, quietly moving from object to environment.

What emerges from these varied approaches in an understanding of the diversity of what the handmade can be. It is not synonymous with imperfection, nor with tradition. Instead, it encompasses both precision and disruption, discipline and experimentation. The contemporary ceramic landscape is defined by this plurality.

Beyond questions of process and philosophy, ceramics exerts another, more immediate pull: it engages the body. Unlike much contemporary visual culture, which is designed to be consumed at a distance, ceramic objects invite a physical response. On seeing a tea bowl by Emmanuel Cooper (lot 168), one imagines its weight, its balance, the texture of the surface in the hand. In a very different way, a sensitivity to surface and touch is also evident in the work of Jennifer Lee where the material of her vessels, like lot 274, invite close, physical engagement.

This “urge to touch” is not incidental; it is central to how these works are understood. In more playful works, such as the work of Ian Godfrey (lots 127-131), the forms themselves become a point of engagement, inviting not just admiration but curiosity, even amusement. These objects resist passive viewing. They ask to be handled, to be lived with.

These haptic qualities are intrinsic to many ceramic works and are especially resonant in functional forms, where tactility is experienced in everyday use. The feel of an Akiko Hirai sake cup in the hand, warmed by tea poured from a teapot with its distinctive twisted willow handle (lot 291), becomes a quiet, multi-sensory experience.

Importantly, this tactile dimension extends beyond ceramics. In a mixed-media context, it becomes possible to see how different craft disciplines share a common language. Whether working in glass, wood, metal, or textile, contemporary makers are often interested in the physical encounter between object and viewer, as seen in works across the sale, where similar concerns with material, process, and tactility extend beyond ceramics into other craft disciplines.

It is not the intention to frame this as a “return” to the handmade as the handmade never disappeared. What has shifted is how it is understood and valued, particularly by new audiences for whom ceramics and craft feel especially attuned as an antidote to the present moment.

The works brought together in this auction reflect that shift. They offer something that much of contemporary culture does not: resistance to speed, to uniformity, to distance. It insists instead on time, touch, and reflection.

We invite you to view the auction online or visit us in the gallery and consider what these objects offer – especially now – when material, integrity, and human connection feel more vital than ever.

The auction is now viewing online. The Covent Garden gallery exhibition and bidding will open on Saturday 9 May, with bidding closing on Thursday 14 May at maaklondon.com

About Maak
Maak is the leading auction house specialising in contemporary ceramics and craft. Known for its expertly curated sales and dedication to showcasing the best in international ceramics and craft, Maak provides a platform for collectors to acquire rare and exceptional works from both established and emerging artists through both their regular auction schedule and private sales.

Sofia Beça: Where the Body Listens to Matter — Records of a Working Body is on view at Espaço Mira, Porto

April 11 – June 6, 2026

The works presented in this exhibition result from three artist residencies carried out in China, between 2024 and 2025, in Shangyu, Jingdezhen and Yixing. They were developed in distinct contexts, with specific materials and working conditions that directly influenced the way each piece was constructed.

Porcelain, worked in Shangyu and Jingdezhen, allowed for the exploration of limits of thickness, continuity and resistance. Stoneware, in Yixing, imposed greater density and restraint, leading to more compact forms and a more direct approach to the material.

The exhibition does not separate these moments. It brings them into relation. The works are organised in series and variations, where small differences accumulate. There are no unique pieces in an isolated sense — each exists within a set.

The presence of writing and print runs through several works. It appears fragmented, incomplete, sometimes almost illegible. It is not text for continuous reading, but material integrated into the very construction of the pieces. In Yixing, some of these presences approach literary references, such as the texts of Su Dongpo, not as citation, but as a point of contact between language and matter.

The exhibition also includes videos and photographs produced during the residencies. They show the places, the working processes and the concrete conditions in which the works were made. They do not function as external documentation, but as part of the work itself.

Sound is present on two levels. An installation composed of around 2,400 small ceramic elements, suspended in four lines of five metres, enters into vibration and produces a resonance close to that of bells. In parallel, the exhibition includes a sound piece by Jorge Queijo, a musician invited by the artist, which moves through the space and interferes with the perception of the whole.

This work was developed in a cultural context that is not that of the artist. This displacement is not a theme, but a condition: it affects time, available materials, ways of working and the relationship with what is produced. The exhibition thus presents a body of work constructed from these conditions, without separating process and result.

Contact
miragalerias@miragalerias.net

Espaço Mira
MIRA Galerias
Rua Miraflor, no 155 / 159,
4300 – 334, Porto
Portugal

Photos by Antonio Chaves

Forms From The Subsoil is on view at Sala de Arte CCU, Santiago, Chile

April 9 – June 5, 2026

Participating artists: Magdalena Atria, Renata Ayala, Macarena Correa, José Cori, Colomba Fontaine, Martín Kaulen, Patricio Kind, Mariette Lefranc, Rocío Olivares, Daniela Pulido, Paula Subercaseaux, Valentina Soto, Catalina Vial and Catalina Zarzar.

Ceramics carries a familiar history: vessel, function, craft, permanence. For centuries, it has been tied to utility, ritual, everyday use and, of course, manual skill. Forms from the Subsoil begins precisely from the possibility of interrupting that familiarity. Not in order to deny this history, but to ask again under what conditions ceramics appears today, what relations it activates, and what status it acquires when it no longer responds docilely to the categories that have historically organized it.

The exhibition does not attempt to offer a survey of contemporary ceramics. Instead, it proposes a scene in which the medium shifts its condition. Clay appears as surface, volume, edge, residue, structure, skin, module or fragment. At times it preserves a memory of the vessel; at others, it seems to have passed through that genealogy and become organism, relief, expanded image or spatial device. Rather than a rejection of tradition, what emerges is an insistent negotiation with it: a ceramics that does not entirely abandon its narratives of origin, but does not allow itself to be contained by them either.

This condition is activated through the way the works are placed in relation to one another. The exhibition display avoids a neutral or individual sequence and instead proposes a syntax of appearances. Shelves, platforms, metal racks, open structures and suspended surfaces displace ceramics from the singular logic of the pedestal, distributing it across multiple regimes of reading. At moments, the display suggests a worktable; at others, an archive, a storage room, a shelf or an architectural structure. The meaning of each piece depends on its form, surface and scale, but also on its proximity, isolation and the neighborhood in which it is inscribed.

For this reason, the exhibition is better understood less as a group of objects than as a system of circulation. Some works, when gathered together, form communities; others produce differences, contrasts or shared scenes. Others, by contrast, interrupt the route and change the temperature of the exhibition. Certain pieces break through the overall density in order to reveal another rhythm within the show. A raw material such as quartz, associated with the formulation of glazes, may cease to be a recipe and become an autonomous surface; a binding material such as slip may shift toward drawing and cartography; a form close to furniture, such as a table, may open an ambiguous zone between art, design and use.

The “subsoil” of the title may seem obvious: it refers to the physical origin of clay, to minerals, sediments and materials extracted from the earth. But it also points to a historical and sensorial thickness. It is deposit, stratum, pressure and latency: a zone where inherited techniques, persistent errors, industrial procedures, formal intuitions, affective gestures and barely visible imaginaries accumulate. In some works, such as those by Catalina Vial, this appears as a recomposition of layers, traces and contacts. In others, such as Martín Kaulen’s, it becomes the sedimentation of an unstable perception. Elsewhere, as in Daniela Pulido’s work, it emerges as a symbolic memory condensed in forms that touch upon the ritual or the heraldic without fully settling into either register. Even the counterform, the mold and the casting process, so visible in certain operations by Renata Ayala, bring this ground to the surface as an active part of the work.

Seen up close, many of these pieces share an unstable morphology. Not because they are poorly defined, but because they refuse to settle into a single formal family. At times, matter shifts toward image; elsewhere, the line thickens until it becomes edge, drawing in space or supporting structure. In other works, volume opens, perforates or crumbles, as if preserving the memory of an internal pressure. Some forms seem to emerge through patient accumulation; others through assemblage, stitching, grafting or modular repetition. In Paula Subercaseaux’s Hormigueros series, for example, the surface concentrates a contained intensity, almost as if excavated. In other areas of the exhibition, porosity, opacity and filtration push the reading toward less resolved states, closer to material testing than to the closure of the object. This instability is also a negotiation with the technical conditions of the medium: shrinkage, fracture, collapse, the memory of firing, and the resistance of the material.

It is here that the exhibition becomes especially fertile. The works cease to assert themselves as closed units and begin to behave as neighborhoods. The display organizes these differences in order to sustain them. The ornamental, the tectonic, the playful and the architectural remain together. Without abandoning the singularity of each work, the exhibition attempts to construct a scene of contagion, resonance and friction.

There is also a deeper intuition running through the exhibition: ceramics retains a historical capacity to gather. Long before modernity separated art from craft, utility from autonomy, clay was tied to scenes of assembly and ritual: the table, the offering, storage, ceremony, mourning. Ceramics contains things; more importantly, it also contains ways of being together. Perhaps this is why it has proven so difficult to discipline completely. Even when it is reduced to craft or elevated to sculpture, a fundamental ambiguity persists within it: it remains intimate and public, utilitarian and symbolic, tactile and speculative, domestic and architectural at the same time.

Forms from the Subsoil works through this ambiguity without attempting to resolve it. Far from offering a conciliatory image of the medium, it configures a territory in tension. Ceramics appears as a matter that never fully settles: it accumulates layers, remains and excesses; it changes meaning depending on where it is placed; it is affected by architecture, distance, support and the company of other forms. The exhibition does not seek to establish a new definition of ceramics. Instead, it leaves it open, as something still taking place and deliberately unwilling to come to rest.

Curatorship – Exhibition Design – Furniture Design: Patricio Kind
Production: Patricio Kind – Claudia Verdejo – Celeste Vilches
Exhibition Design Render: Camilo Contreras
Furniture Construction: Ignacio Mardones
Installation: Periferia Arte – Viviana Herrera – Ignacio Mardones – Teresa Córdova – Alejandro Orellana – Celeste Vilches
Gallery Map Design: Celeste Vilches
Paint Sponsorship: KRACK
With the support of: FAAD UDP / Escuela de Arte, through the Artistic Creation Grant Fund

Contact
ccuenelarte@ccu.cl

Sala de Arte CCU
Av. Vitacura 2680
Las Condes, Santiago
Chile

Photos by Jorge Brantmayer

If you happen to be in London over the coming week(s), several major ceramics events are worth adding to your calendar. Ceramics Unbound launches at the Affordable Art Fair Hampstead from May 6–10, marking the fair’s first dedicated ceramics exhibition, curated by Caroline Jackman. Ceramic Art London returns to Olympia West from May 8–10, bringing together leading studio ceramic artists in one of the UK’s most important ceramics fairs. Next week, Secret Ceramics returns during London Craft Week at Sotheby’s from May 11–17, presenting 100 donated works by leading and emerging artists, sold anonymously in support of FiredUp4 Clay Clubs. I also recommend visiting Refigured: Embodiment in Contemporary Ceramics at County Hall Pottery, on view from May 12 to June 21, with a private view on May 11 (the final exhibition in the gallery’s in-house program before the space closes this summer).

Looking beyond London, the ceramics calendar remains full this month, with exhibitions, competitions, and fairs opening or taking place across Europe and beyond. Highlights include the XVII International Ceramic Biennial of Manises (opens May 8, Manises, Spain), the LOEWE Craft Prize 2026 (opens May 13, Singapore), the Diessener Pottery Market (May 14–17, Dießen am Ammersee, Germany), the 6th International Ceramics Triennial UNICUM (opens May 15, Ljubljana, Slovenia), the 43rd Concurs International de Ceràmica de l’Alcora (opens May 16, L’Alcora, Spain), and the Ceramic Market Andenne – Li Dièle (May 24–25, Andenne, Belgium). Find more events in our 2026 calendar.

The city of Castellamonte (Italy) has opened applications for the international competition Ceramics in Love, organized as part of the 65th Castellamonte Ceramics Exhibition. Open to all ceramic artists, the competition focuses on ceramics as a field of passion, originality, and contemporary expression, across art and design. Selected works will be exhibited at Palazzo Botton from August 22 to September 13, 2026. Awards include a €4,000 first prize. Applications are due May 30, 2026.

Ceramic artists based in the US are invited to submit their work for the Baltimore Clayworks Clay Biennial 2027, a national juried exhibition organized by Baltimore Clayworks in conjunction with the 61st Conference of the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA). Juried by Ching Yuan Chang, the exhibition highlights the diversity and evolving language of contemporary ceramics, welcoming functional, sculptural, installation-based, and experimental works. The exhibition will be on view from January 9 to March 13, 2027, with applications due September 25, 2026.

Applications are now open for Small Favors 2026, the 20th anniversary edition of the popular exhibition organized by The Clay Studio. Open to US-based artists working in any media, the exhibition challenges participants to create works that fit within a 4-inch cube, encouraging experimentation at a small scale. Selected pieces will be exhibited and offered for sale from October 8 to December 31, 2026, with a broad price range aimed at both new and established collectors. Applications are due June 1, 2026.

The Clay Studio continues its Clay & Conversations series this May with three online talks featuring artists, curators, and scholars. On May 7, partners from the Museum for Art in Wood will discuss Radical Americana with Jennifer Navva Milliken, Viola Bordon, and BA Harrington. On May 14, art historian Ezra Shales will present his new book, Pitchers of American Life: Art Within Reach. The series continues on May 21 with Laura Keim of Stenton, previewing upcoming Radical Americana exhibitions. All events take place on Zoom, and registration is free.

The North West Ceramics Foundation will host their next Speakers Series on Sunday, May 24, 2026, at 4pm PST, featuring Australian artist Dr. Peter Wilson. Dr. Wilson’s talk Materiality, intuition, heart, head and hands: seduced by the magic of clay will focus on the various stages of his life as a potter: continuous learning, skill development, understanding materials, the fire, glazes, the striving for perfection, finding a direction, and the need for constant renewal, what he calls “trying to fix a silent poem in clay.”

Book recommendation: Queer Crafts: Material Practices and the Making of Identity by Daniel Fountain. Through a focused analysis of work made from textiles, ceramics, wood, paper, metal, and glass, this book explores how contemporary artists, designers, and practitioners identifying as LGBTQ+ use a range of craft materials and processes to explore their identity and queerness. Find the book on Amazon (international) or Bookshop (US).

Exhibitions

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

• Magdalena Suarez Frimkess. Organized by Shio Kusaka at David Zwirner, Los Angeles
• Chenlu Hou and Chiara No: What the Hands Remember to Hear at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield
• Marte Johnslien: Fotofobia at Galleri Riis, Oslo

What’s on View

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

1. Kathy Butterly: Assume Yes at Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY
2. Barnaby Barford: We Are Where We Are at David Gill Gallery, London
3. MORE CLAY! The Power of Repetition at Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, MA
4. New Generation – Passion for ceramics at Keramiekcentrum Tiendschuur, Tegelen
5. Ranti Bam: Sacred Groves at South London Gallery, London
6. Yves Malfiet: Olé Désiré! at Erasmus House Museum, Brussels
7. Steven Edwards: Soft Geometry at Vessel Gallery, London
8. Andreas Tesch: Future Fossils at Museum Art.Plus, Donaueschingen
9. Nanni Balentini: Interspaces at Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY
10. Earthworks: Evolution at The Umbrella Art Center, Concord, MA

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Featured image – Kathy Butterly: Assume Yes at Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY

Christine Coste (b. 1965) is a visual and performance artist based in Pélussin, Southern France. Her practice moves between ceramics, drawing, and performance, exploring the body through an ongoing exchange between these fields. Between 1991 and 2001, she attended live model classes led by ceramicist Nicole Giroud at the Paris Ateliers des beaux-arts. In 2001, she established her own independent ceramic studio in Paris. She is a member of the International Academy of Ceramics and regularly participates in residencies and exhibitions internationally.

Coste’s work addresses fragmentation and hybridisation, with human and animal forms merging into ambiguous figures. Faces are often obscured, suggesting bodies in states of transformation, encounter, and shifting identity.

“Around the issue of the body, Christine Coste works on the interweaving of three specific plastic fields: ceramics, drawing and performance. Her work is an incessant coming and going between these territories. Whatever the medium, the forms complement, blend and extend in such a way as to provoke disturbing points of view and perspectives for the viewer. Rarely faces, except as hooded or buried, the expression being made by the movement itself, whether in the drawings, or through the articulation of the ceramic sculptures. The volumes are fluid, covered with a kind of weft or graphic mesh that she works with oxides, or even with transfer, giving the illusion of a second skin, sometimes even close to a down or an animal shell. It is of course a question here of metamorphoses, mutations, encounters and fusions at the heart of the living world. It is a question of body and sensuality, not to say sexuality, so much the sculptures with carnal contours seem animated from the inside, and endowed with an undeniable organic power.” Text by Jean-Marc Dimanche, 2022

Visit Christine Coste’s website and Instagram page.

Featured work

Faux-semblant (False pretense), 2024-2026

À rebours (Backward), 2026