WOODFIRING JAMBOREE

Millstone Pottery in MacGregor

Wood-firing Workshop

29, 30 April & 1 May 2011

An intimate week-end workshop celebrating this ancient and time-honoured firing method; for ceramicists, potters and other romantics wanting to have work fired in a wood-fired kiln. Specialised attention to all attendees.

Make your pots at a pre-firing teabowl workshop in Cape Town to ensure your efforts are rewarded when firing the kiln.

Workshops and events planned over the week-end include:

· decorating and glazing for wood-firing with Paul de Jongh

· firing of train kiln

· participatory continuous slab building with Hennie Meyer

· powerpoint presentation with Clementina van der Walt

· “Elemental” – a film about Ken Matsuzaki, a Japanese wood-firing potter

· Journey along the McGregor art route

Cost: R2 000 for the workshops, inclusive of food on Friday night, breakfast, lunch and dinner on Saturday and breakfast and lunch on Sunday. Camping facilities available.

For more information or to book, please contact Nina or Paul on (023) 625 1599 or e-mail: millstone@breede.co.za. See also: www.millstonepottery.co.za

MOODY INTERIORS

My plate with nude in the guest bathroom

My botanical plate is above a Betty Cillers sketch of lilies

My beaker (with the yellow rose) s next to an Edward Roworth oil

My wall vase next to a David Goldblatt photograph

A friend and client Pam Strauss took these shots with her iPhone - atmospheric interiors of her home featuring pieces of my ceramics.

IN GOOD COMPANY

Two years ago I visited St.Ives which I loved and treated as a sort of 'pilgrimage', mainly intended to visit the famous Leach pottery, run today by Jack Doherty. In addition I discovered many more inspiring aspects to this Cornish fishing village.
Wills Lane Gallery has been selling my work for several years now, and this year, my colleague Hennie Meyer visited St.Ives and took these photographs of my work in the gallery window...and..I was delighted to see my name up alongside some great artists!

SURPRISE IN DUBLIN

Whilst browsing in a charity shop in Dublin I was astonished to find a plate of mine, made probably some time in the 90's...how did it end up in Dublin? Objects certainly would have a tale to tell...

CERAMIC ART LONDON 2011

Susan O'Byrne

Nuala O'Donovan

Maria Wodjat

Tanya Gomez

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Hennie Meyer, Magdalena Odundo and Clementina van der Walt at CAL 2011

For some reason I can't load more than 5 images onto one blog post so here are some of the highlights of Ceramic Art London 2011. I have put more onto Facebook if you have access to that.

The standard of work was extremely high and it was a great privilege to be featured with top UK and other international potters.

THREADS OF FEELING

Installation by Annabel Lewis

An extraordinary and moving exhibition is the Threads of Feeling at The Foundling Museum in Bloomsbury, London. Do check out the website for images of little pieces of textiles which were the only material link left between the mother and her abandoned child.

Fabric swatches from the 18th century tell stories of mother and babies parting

Threads of Feeling will showcase fabrics never shown before to illustrate the moment of parting as mothers left their babies at the original Foundling Hospital, which continues today as the children’s charity Coram.

In the cases of more than 4,000 babies left between 1741 and 1760, a small object or token, usually a piece of fabric, was kept as an identifying record. The fabric was either provided by the mother or cut from the child’s clothing by the hospital's nurses. Attached to registration forms and bound up into ledgers, these pieces of fabric form the largest collection of everyday textiles surviving in Britain from the 18th Century.

A selection of the textiles and the stories they tell us about individual babies, their mothers and their lives forms the focus of the Threads of Feeling exhibition. The exhibition will also examine artist William Hogarth’s depictions of the clothes, ribbons, embroidery and fabrics worn in the 18th Century as represented by the textile tokens.

John Styles Research Professor in History at the University of Hertfordshire received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to curate the exhibition. John comments: “The process of giving over a baby to the hospital was anonymous. It was a form of adoption, whereby the hospital became the infant’s parent and its previous identity was effaced. The mother’s name was not recorded, but many left personal notes or letters exhorting the hospital to care for their child. Occasionally children were reclaimed. The pieces of fabric in the ledgers were kept, with the expectation that they could be used to identify the child if it was returned to its mother.

The textiles are both beautiful and poignant, embedded in a rich social history. Each swatch reflects the life of a single infant child. But the textiles also tell us about the clothes their mothers wore, because baby clothes were usually made up from worn-out adult clothing. The fabrics reveal how working women struggled to be fashionable in the 18th Century.”

Curator John Styles: http://www.johnstyles.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/

JERWOOD CONTEMPORARY MAKERS

I NEVER REALLY KNEW HER

I have just returned to London from Ireland where I visited the
Jerwood Contemporary Makers Exhibition at the Crafts Council Gallery in Kilkenny.
The above piece by Emma Woffenden I found very powerful.

Also most poignant is the text of the catalogue by Jeanette Winterson which follows here:

The
Making
Game
The most satisfying thing a human being can do – and the sexiest – is
to make something.
Life is about relationship – to each other – and to the material world.
Making something is a relationship.
The verb is the clue. We make love, we make babies, we make
dinner, we make sense, we make a difference, we make it up, we
make it new…
True, we sometimes make a mess, but creativity never was a
factory finish.
The wrestle with material isn’t about subduing; it is about making a
third thing that didn’t exist before. The raw material was there, and
you were there, but the relationship that happens between maker
and material allows the finished piece to be what it is. And that
allows a further relationship to develop between the piece and the
viewer or the buyer.
Both relationships are in every way different from mass production
or store bought objects that, however useful, are dead on
arrival. Anyone who makes something finds its life, whether it’s
Michelangelo releasing David from twenty tons of Carrara marble,
or potter Jane Cox spinning me a plate using the power of her
shoulders, the sureness of her hands, the concentration of her mind.
I have a set of silverware made by an eighteenth century
silverworker called Hester Bateman, one of the very few women
working in flatware at that time. When I eat with her spoons, I feel
the work and the satisfaction that went into making them – the
handle and bowl are in equal balance – and I feel a part of time as
it really is – not chopped into little bits, but continuous. She made
this beautiful thing, it’s still here, and I am here too, writing my
books, eating my soup, two women making things across time. I feel
connection, respect, delight. And it is just a spoon…
But the thing about craft, about the making of everyday objects
that we can have around us, about the making of objects that are
beautiful and/or useful, is that our everyday life is enriched.
How is it enriched? To make something is to be both conscious and
concentrated – it is a fully alert state, but not one of anxious hyper-
arousal. We all know the flow we feel when we are absorbed in what
we do. I find that by having a few things around me that have been
made by someone’s hand and eye and imagination working together,
I am prevented from passing through my daily life in a kind of blur.
I have to notice what is in front of me – the table, the vase, the hand-
blocked curtains, the thumb prints in the sculpture, the lettering
block. I have some lamps made by Marianna Kennedy, and what I
switch on is not a bulb on a stem; it is her sense of light.
So I am in relationship to the object and in relationship to the maker.
This allows me to escape from the anonymity and clutter of the
way we live now. Instead of surrounding myself with lots of things
I hardly notice, I have a few things that also seem to notice me. No
doubt this is a fantasy – but…
The life of objects is a strange one.
A maker creates something like a fossil record. She or he is
imprinted in the piece. We know that energy is never lost, only that
it changes its form, and it seems to me that the maker shape-shifts
her/himself into the object. That is why it remains a living thing.
Of course it is possible to design an object that will be made by
others – but that is an extension of the creative relationship, not its
antithesis. It is the ceaseless reproduction of meaningless objects
that kills creativity for all of us, as producers and consumers.
But are producers and consumers who we want to be?
To make is to do. It is an active verb. Creativity is present in every
child ever born. Kids love making things. There are different doses
and dilutions of creativity, and the force is much stronger in some
than in others – but it is there for all of us, and should never have
been separated off from life into art.
I would like to live in a creative continuum that runs from the child’s
drawing on the fridge to Lucien Freud, from the coffee cups made
by a young ceramicist to Grayson Perry’s pots.
We don’t need to agonise over the boundaries between ‘art’
and ‘craft’, any more than we should be separating art and life.
The boundary is between the creative exuberance of being
human, and the monotony of an existence dependent on mass
production – objects, food, values, aspirations.
Making is personal.
Making is shared.
Making is a celebration of who we are.
Jeanette Winterson
16 June to 25 July
Jerwood Space
Jerwood Contemporary MakersThe
Making
Game
The most satisfying thing a human being can do – and the sexiest – is
to make something.
Life is about relationship – to each other – and to the material world.
Making something is a relationship.
The verb is the clue. We make love, we make babies, we make
dinner, we make sense, we make a difference, we make it up, we
make it new…
True, we sometimes make a mess, but creativity never was a
factory finish.
The wrestle with material isn’t about subduing; it is about making a
third thing that didn’t exist before. The raw material was there, and
you were there, but the relationship that happens between maker
and material allows the finished piece to be what it is. And that
allows a further relationship to develop between the piece and the
viewer or the buyer.
Both relationships are in every way different from mass production
or store bought objects that, however useful, are dead on
arrival. Anyone who makes something finds its life, whether it’s
Michelangelo releasing David from twenty tons of Carrara marble,
or potter Jane Cox spinning me a plate using the power of her
shoulders, the sureness of her hands, the concentration of her mind.
I have a set of silverware made by an eighteenth century
silverworker called Hester Bateman, one of the very few women
working in flatware at that time. When I eat with her spoons, I feel
the work and the satisfaction that went into making them – the
handle and bowl are in equal balance – and I feel a part of time as
it really is – not chopped into little bits, but continuous. She made
this beautiful thing, it’s still here, and I am here too, writing my
books, eating my soup, two women making things across time. I feel
connection, respect, delight. And it is just a spoon…
But the thing about craft, about the making of everyday objects
that we can have around us, about the making of objects that are
beautiful and/or useful, is that our everyday life is enriched.
How is it enriched? To make something is to be both conscious and
concentrated – it is a fully alert state, but not one of anxious hyper-
arousal. We all know the flow we feel when we are absorbed in what
we do. I find that by having a few things around me that have been
made by someone’s hand and eye and imagination working together,
I am prevented from passing through my daily life in a kind of blur.
I have to notice what is in front of me – the table, the vase, the hand-
blocked curtains, the thumb prints in the sculpture, the lettering
block. I have some lamps made by Marianna Kennedy, and what I
switch on is not a bulb on a stem; it is her sense of light.
So I am in relationship to the object and in relationship to the maker.
This allows me to escape from the anonymity and clutter of the
way we live now. Instead of surrounding myself with lots of things
I hardly notice, I have a few things that also seem to notice me. No
doubt this is a fantasy – but…
The life of objects is a strange one.
A maker creates something like a fossil record. She or he is
imprinted in the piece. We know that energy is never lost, only that
it changes its form, and it seems to me that the maker shape-shifts
her/himself into the object. That is why it remains a living thing.
Of course it is possible to design an object that will be made by
others – but that is an extension of the creative relationship, not its
antithesis. It is the ceaseless reproduction of meaningless objects
that kills creativity for all of us, as producers and consumers.
But are producers and consumers who we want to be?
To make is to do. It is an active verb. Creativity is present in every
child ever born. Kids love making things. There are different doses
and dilutions of creativity, and the force is much stronger in some
than in others – but it is there for all of us, and should never have
been separated off from life into art.
I would like to live in a creative continuum that runs from the child’s
drawing on the fridge to Lucien Freud, from the coffee cups made
by a young ceramicist to Grayson Perry’s pots.
We don’t need to agonise over the boundaries between ‘art’
and ‘craft’, any more than we should be separating art and life.
The boundary is between the creative exuberance of being
human, and the monotony of an existence dependent on mass
production – objects, food, values, aspirations.
Making is personal.
Making is shared.
Making is a celebration of who we are.