Clay

Throwing & decorating English slipware pots: Taena Pottery, Gloucestershire

14 Comments / English Slipware /

I had the pleasure of filming two exceptional people and skilled potters demonstrating their craft! The historic Taena Pottery – surrounded by mulberry trees and bee-filled lavender – is having its first flirtation with the internet!

Vici and Sean Casserley are the second generation of potters to run the beautiful Taena Pottery. It was started in 1948 by a group of conscientious objectors and survived their dispersal in the 1960s.

Specialising in traditional English slipware, Vici and Sean make and sell their pots from a studio and shop nestled on the edge of the Cotswold escarpment. You can buy read-made or bespoke pieces.

Contact details:
Whitley Court,
Upton-St-Leonards,
Gloucester,
Gloucestershire,
GL4 8EB
Tel: +44 (0)1452 610908

Slipware is a traditional method of decorating clay pots, practiced globally in a variety of styles. English medieval pottery is often decorated with slip and sgraffito (the two techniques demonstrated here) and can be seen on the Tring Tiles at the British Museum:

I am an Art Historian at Cambridge University, with a deep admiration for practitioners of heritage crafts. I grew up near Sean and Vici and hope this film serves as a celebration of lives devoted to creating useful & beautiful things, or, as Sean puts it, 'making nice pots for nice people.'

Chris Gustin – Walter Gropius Master Artist Ceramic Symposium

20 Comments / Chris Gustin /

Chris Gustin is a studio artist and an Emeritus Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. He received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1975, and his MFA from Alfred University in 1977. Gustin lives and works in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts. Gustin’s work is published extensively and is represented in numerous public and private collections, including the Renwick Gallery of the National Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the World Ceramic Exposition Foundation in Icheon, Korea, the American Museum of Ceramic Art, the Currier Museum of Art, the Yingge Museum in Taipai, and the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art. With more than 50 solo exhibitions, he has exhibited, lectured and taught workshops in the United States, Caribbean, South America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts Artist Fellowships, and four Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowships, the most recent in 2017. He is a member of the International Academy of Ceramics and was elected to the American Craft Council College of Fellows in 2016. He was awarded the Masters of the Medium award from the Renwick Alliance in 2017. Gustin is co-founder of the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Maine, and currently serves as Honorary Trustee on its board.

Chris is one of six artists who were chosen for similar reasons, and also for ones unique to each of them. All of them share a love of the material of clay, and an appreciation for the function of the particular objects that they create. Each of their experiences in clay is individual, but the common thread of education, from the past, present, and future, with their instructors being working artists in their field, ties them to the foundation of the Bauhaus.

For more information on the Walter Gropius Master Artist Ceramic Symposium, go to www.hmoa.org/education/gropius-ceramic-symposium/. For more information on the Walter Gropius Master Artist Program, go to www.waltergropius.org.

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This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. To find out more about how the National Endowment for the Arts grants impact individuals and communities, visit www.arts.gov.

This project is presented with financial assistance from the West Virginia Department of the Arts, Culture and History, and the National Endowment for the Arts, with approval from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts.

The Walter Gropius Master Artist Series is funded through the generosity of the Estate of Roxanna Y. Booth, who wished to assist in the development of an art education program in accordance with the proposals of Walter Gropius, who designed the Museum’s Gropius Addition, as well as the Gropius Studios. The Museum is indebted to Roxanna Y. Booth’s son, the late Alex Booth, Jr., for his participation in the concept development of the Gropius Master Artists Workshops.

Those Famous Blue Chinese Bowls Come From This Town

34 Comments / Chinese Ceramics /

These bowls, called linglong (玲珑) porcelain, used to be everywhere in the West. And they all come from this one town in China.

We visited one of the last factories that still makes this style of blue and white porcelain, and deciphered the symbols that cover the bowl.

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Written and Voiceover by: Clarissa Wei
Produced and Shot by: Nathaniel Brown and Clarissa Wei
Edited by: Nicholas Ko
Animated by: Ray Ngan
Special Thanks: Dolly Li, Nicholas Ko, Hanley Chu
Mastered by: Victor Peña

Music: Audio Network

#porcelain #artisan #artsandcrafts

Bernard Leach – A Potter’s World (Extract)

14 Comments / Bernard Leach /

Bernard Leach is, without a doubt, the best known and most prominent of British studio potters.
Born in Hong Kong, he was taken almost immediately to Japan by his grandparents.
He came to England at the age of ten for schooling.
In 1909 he returned to Japan to teach etching which he had himself learnt from Frank Brangwyn.
After ten years of life in the East – both Japan and China – he met Hamada.
The following year they both came to England and set up the Leach Pottery at St Ives.
The years between the wars were hard for Leach; he spent much time re-building kilns, experimenting with materials, travelling – but not achieving much critical or financial success.
It was not until after the Second World War, and the publication of his first book, A Potters' Book, that he became widely recognised as a master in his field.
He continued to pot until 1972, but did not stop his ceaseless travelling.
The Victoria and Albert Museum in London held an exhibition – The Art of Bernard Leach – in 1977, and in 1979 he died.