In the PROFILES section: 8 ceramic artists from Italy, Portugal, Germany, Austria, France. Coverage of EXHIBITIONS and EVENTS in Germany, USA, Taiwan, Ghana. In the section ARTIST JOURNAL, we present Akiko Maeda and Wanying Liang. And we also have interviews with artists IN STUDIO as well as listings of Dates, Courses, Seminars and Markets.
NEWS
PROFILES
Sara Dario – Italy
Manuel Seita – Portugal
Isabell Kamp – Germany
Andrea Baumann – Austria
Katarina Löber / Thomas Löber-Buchmann – Germany
Ulrike Zerzer – Austria
Estelle Robert – France
EXHIBITIONS / EVENTS
Katharina Beesk – Ringelheim – Germany
Toshiko Takaezu – New York – USA
House Guests / Shards for Happiness – Fürstenberg – Germany
Galerie Belinda Berger – Westerstede – Germany
Muscle Memory Collective – Yingge – Taiwan
spacial notations / Lena Kaapke – Erfurt – Germany
Ceramics in the Ancient World – International
Online Teaching – New York / Shanghai – International
Exploring Sub-Saharan Africa – Ghana
BOOKS
New literature
ARTIST JOURNAL
Akiko Maeda (Japan) and Wanying Liang (China) – Ting-Ju Shao
IN STUDIO
Jose Maria Mariscal – Evelyne Schoenmann– Interview / Developing Skills
DATES / Exhibitions / Galleries / Museums
COURSES / SEMINARS / MARKETS
ADVERTISEMENTS
PREVIEW
Monika Gass talks to Sara Dario
Your work is amazingly beautiful: it’s so interesting to look at the colourful photos and landscapes on the shimmering whitish porcelain of your pieces. This is your style and professionalism – a result of your excellent education in the arts or the result of your inspiration?
This is a result of both experiences.
I studied Art in High School in Venice and Sculpture in the Fine Art Academy of Carrara. During my studies there, I was 3 years for a Long Erasmus in Munich at the Fine Art Academy, where I learned different techniques to print over different materials, photographic, photo silk screen, photo engraving.
All of my schooling was excellent but the experience in the Academy in Munich was for me amazingly important for my future work.
Every project must have a meaning and a thought. Before creating a new project, we presented and commented about it to the class, in front of everybody and explained our intent and if our presentation was valid, you could develop it.
This way of teaching made every piece a result of inspiration, together with a thought and a meaning, so my pieces have “thought” process behind them.
Sara Dario
Andrea Baumann lives and works in Tyrol, in the mountains ovelooking Innsbruck, an almost paradisiacal place.
She completed her apprenticeship as a ceramist in Landshut, opened her first studio in Freiburg, studied fine art ceramics with Johannes Gebhardt and experimental painting with Renate Anger in Kiel. Later, during a one-year study trip to Reykjavik, she developed her first artistic interventions, videos and photos with great success.
She studied visual design and therapy at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.
Since 2003 she has been running her studio again working in porcelain.
She colours porcelain from Limoges in France, white, light, translucent, and, with her hands, creates a variety of shapes ranging from cylinders, spheres and hemispheres to plates, cups, bowls and platters, even teapots. Her tools are her hands, her sensory organs, which realize ideas of form, which with their organic presence are often reminiscent of delicate, fragile flowers.
For Baumann, building her vessels seems to be an activity with external and internal movement. Marks of her work process define the grace of the vessels, stable and fragile, and the interplay of material aesthetics, liveliness, lightness, light and colour elevates them to an energy-charged overall picture.
(Christoph Hasenberg)
Andrea Baumann
Anyone who enters the showroom of the two ceramic artists Katarina Löber and Thomas Löber-Buchmann in a Wilhelminian quarter of Halle can feel the special atmosphere, defined by the vessels and objects. Beauty surrounds the visitor, a beauty in the classic sense based on harmony and symmetry. On the wall there is a selection of large bowls, showing the variety of decorations and patterns that the two ceramists have created over the course of many years. At first glance, they seem to be the products of one artist. But on closer inspection, different working methods and preferences in design become apparent, each with their own formal idiom on the same items, which, due to their size, can only be produced together.
The artists Katarina Löber and Thomas Löber-Buchmann have been working together in a studio for years and do not get in each other’s way. On the contrary. The professional exchange is important to them, talking about processes and procedures, also about organization, which is easier to manage in a team. Both of them find the discussion of new ideas particularly stimulating. The other’s opinion carries weight. They have known each other for a long time, since they were students at the renowned Burg Giebichenstein art academy in Halle. Katarina Löber began her course before the courses were redesigned. She still values many things very much today: “I had the year in Bürgel and always a week of drawing in Halle. That was good.” After graduating, she studied painting with Otto Möhwald and Roland Paris.
(Doris Weilandt)
Katarina Löber
The French potter Estelle Robert is a ceramic artist heart and soul. Everyday life is close to her heart: the moment when the vessel is used for cooking, drinking, at the table in a large group. The shapes and colours of her ceramics demonstrate great freedom in the handling of the material and are an expression of exuberant creativity – in the truest sense.
Functional pottery – but what pots!
Robert’s works, which are mostly created on the potter’s wheel and fired at 1100°C in a gas kiln, are primarily tableware, “art de la table”, as the French say: plates, cups, mugs, jugs, bowls – as well as other household objects such as gratin dishes, oil jugs, vases, but also soap dishes and even holy water stoups: household utensils, i.e. utility ceramics.
Forms and functions are basically classic, but not their appearance. Robert’s vessels are not smooth and perfectly formed but rather raw, almost as if someone was still practicing. But Robert is a professional, trained ceramist. Of course there are grooves, thumbprints and small bulges – such pieces would hardly have left a factory or workshop. They are unmistakably handcrafted pieces, each one individually, each one separately, and the material used is clay that can be moulded this way. The ceramist thus shows a self-confidence that is diametrically opposed to the traditional demand for perfection: “I am a ceramic artist who works by hand – and I want that to be seen, if you please”.
(Elisabeth Schraut)
Estelle Robert
Museum Schloss Fürstenberg presents two new exhibitions
Since September, two new exhibitions have been running place at Fürstenberg Castle Museum, inviting visitors to take an entertaining, fascinating and nostalgic journey through time. Unique FÜRSTENBERG porcelain from the August Kestner Museum has been visiting the Porcelain Museum in Fürstenberg as “House Guests“. With Scherben zum Glück (“Shards for Happiness”), the museum takes visitors back to a time of political and social upheaval and at the same time tells a great love story. Both special exhibitions opened on 20 September 2024.
“Designing two exhibitions in parallel is a lot of work because each is staged independently. At the same time, they complement each other and we integrate parts into our permanent exhibition”, explains museum director Dr Christian Lechelt, adding, “We are going on a journey through time to past societies and drawing connections to the present – porcelain always reflects the times. That’s what makes it so exciting.” It was an exciting time when Victoria Luise, the only daughter of Kaiser Wilhelm II, married the Hanoverian Welf Prince Ernst August in 1913. The European nobility gathered for the last time before the First World War. The politically arranged wedding was also a marriage of love – a story that still fascinates today.
Shards for Happiness – every plate in the porcelain service was individually painted – photo – Richard Borek Foundation
In the fall of 2021, we, ceramist Joshua R. Clark and photographer Bree Lamb began a collaborative art practice. We created completely new works collaboratively, under the name Muscle Memory Collective (MMC), and used a variety of approaches in our workflow, calling upon our different skill sets and visual strategies to create mixed-media pieces, photographs, sculptures, and installations. At its core, MMC explores the intersection of commodity, fantasy and social currency, through the pairings of referential and uncanny objects and images. We created bright, glossy facades containing a range of familiar visual cues in which the tone of the work vacillates between adoration and critique. With our works, we hope to create surface visions bound in expectation, excess, and desire, offering complex reflections of the American landscape.
In the recent solo exhibition, How to Disappear, at the Yingge Ceramic Art Museum in Taiwan, we used a unique ceramic reclamation process. The reclamation process occured by fusing recycled ceramic material together inside the 3D ceramic printed form by firing it in a kiln. The 3D printed ceramic container is lined with a glass release so that the materials can be easily removed once fired in the kiln, allowing the container to be reused several times.
Untitled
As the dust settles from a worldwide pandemic, many of us ask how events impacted education and pedagogy. Some speak of a pandemic loss in educational attainment, but few talk of possible benefits. Technology was used in new ways to facilitate learning when in-person teaching was forbidden. Pedagogy was conducted remotely through Zoom and other apps. But online education was developed long before the pandemic. For decades, the University of Phoenix – a for-profit corporation – has been developing profitable online courses. Liberty University in Virginia, founded by a “televangelist,” now has 40,000 online students. Stanford University has developed online studio art courses. Can studio ceramics pedagogy alone lie outside these transformational advances?
The State University of New York (SUNY) is one of the pioneering American universities in online education: distance learning. Since 1971, Empire State College of SUNY has been devoted to accessible distance learning rather than profit. Now, every campus of SUNY has online courses. In 2019, SUNY invited the author of this article to develop online SUNY studio art courses.
There are three kinds of online instruction: synchronous, asynchronous and hybrid learning. (Hybrid learning includes both asynchronous and synchronous learning.)
(Marc Leuthold)
Isa van Lier, Walking Island, 2023
Akiko Maeda – Japan
Among the Japanese ceramicists who use plants as their subjects, Akiko Maeda (b.1963) stands out for her flowers that are bolder and more upright than graceful and delicate, with stems and leaves resembling iron blades forged in blue fire, and pistils resembling wild fruits from mountain forests.
Maeda has been attracted to the forms and strength of plants since childhood. Early in her career, she created series titled “Seeds”, “Sprouts”, and “Roots”, which later evolved into the series “Plants”. Her fascination with plants can be traced back to her father’s passion for them, as well as her journeys to tropical countries. In Vietnam, Nipa palms with trunks submerged in water sprawled along the river. Their gigantic, hard brown fruits resembling meteor hammers became her inspiration.
Wanying Liang – China
Liang Wanying’s (b.1989) work is a microcosm of society, a bustling landscape in the garden. It is like a gorgeous and lonely farewell, it hides the author’s observation of social reflection.
The bustling and splendid flower bed layout supports several large piles of gorgeous flowers. Below are pairs of skinny horse legs, which seem to exceed the overall load. A Chinese poet written a poet who was also a factory worker committed suicide in 2014 deeply touched Liang, because the poem resonated with her in a foreign country. She understands that many foreigners cannot find a sense of belonging in the place where they make a living, so she hopes to comfort those who empathize with foreigners geographically or spiritually through a ritualistic artistic language.
(Ting-Ju SHAO)
Akiko Maeda – Japan
Wanying Liang – China
José, I like to start each interview with the background of my guests. Can you tell us something about your biography? Did you always want to become a ceramist?
Yes, I have always worked as a ceramist/potter. I was born in La Bisbal d’Empordà, Spain, an important ceramics town in Catalonia. My father was a potter who worked all his career throwing for others and I learned how to throw from my dad. In 2003, I rented a studio in La Bisbal and started doing low-temperature pottery, making bowls, vases and other functional items. I worked alone, although my wife Maite helped finding clients and selling my work in the markets. In the beginning, I did low-temperature glazed ware in a big diesel-fired, 2 metre (6½’) square kiln. And also did some raku and terra sigillata pieces. In 2008, we bought a house in Albons, a small village only 20 minutes driving from La Bisbal. A house with a big studio space on the first floor. Now I work there and I teach in many countries.
You are a master of crystal glazing. How did you develop a passion for this type of surface?
It was in 2010 when I saw a potter in a market selling crystalline glazes. I bought some books on crystalline glazes and I was instantly hooked. Once I discovered crystals, I became obsessed with them and just couldn’t stop. I’m interested in the never-ending possibilities that these glazes offer. I’ve gained a great deal of knowledge through crystalline glaze websites and through correspondence with other crystalline glaze potters.
(Evelyne Schoenmann)
In Studio with José Maria Mariscal
