The Speed of Craft

Glenn Adamson at Collect, Saatchi Gallery 2010,

Salt firing results

 

          

 

 

plate cracked - bummer.

COLLECT

Steven Bird - War on Pottery.

Just booked my train to london for COLLECT at the Saatchi gallery this weekend... how exciting!

Lochinver

Salt firing with Fergus Stewart
photos on The GSA Ceramics Blog

Some things I was making for the Salt firing....

The textures worked really well. The slips came out the wrong colour but im happy with the results. I'll get them photographed and posted soon.

3rd yr trip to bardon mill!

Charlie Youle & Bevis Martin

http://www.martinandyoule.com/

A secondary Education, 2009, Glazed and unglazed ceramics, board and fabric.

Sand table with thinkers, 2009, Glazed ceramics, wood, sand and paint.

Civic Sculpture, 2009. Ceramics, card paint and wood

Urs Fischer

"...what happens when the hand made is replicated at industrial scale. This is a fair description of a recent group of monumental sculptures by the Swiss artist Urs Fischer, in which five lumps of clay, each casually squeezed in the artist's palm, were scanned, multiplied  many times in size and cast in aluminium. Fischer's fingerprints, now over a meter wide, are out only visual anchors in the massive blur if metal. That such objects can be made at all is astounding (almost needless to say, the casting work was done in China). But for all the grandiose egomania of this project, the subject remains the intimate and humble matter of human touch. " Glenn Adamson. crafts march/april 2010.

 

new black stoneware - prebisque.

New black clay experiments with ST material. I'm looking forward to see how they come out of the bisque. I'll post the outcome soon.

gestures of resistance

click here

Writings...

I had to take a week out of our new 'Indulgence' project to write a critical review of sources. So reading week was actually spent reading rather than catching up on previous projects as it normally is. So after a week of camping out at Glasgow uni library and feeling very much like the quintessential 'proper student' I handed in all 3356 words to find I only really needed to write around 1500... Oh well.

With the substantial number of publications on craft theory over the past few years I selected a few examples of British and American writing and compared them to previous texts. I divide between American and British views quickly became distinct. Where British writers tend to move away from the craft/art divide, arguing that it does exist, and it this very divide that is crafts most interesting feature, many American publications argue the Craft is Art opinion. I have reviewed Howard Risatti -A theory of craft: function and aesthetic expression, Rose Slyka - The New Ceramic Presence, David Pye - The Nature and Art of Workmanship, Glenn Adamson -Thinking Through Craft and Richard Sennett - The Craftsman.

I am aware that I am being very atlantic-centric (if that's even a phrase) I my choice and would LOVE some reccommendations on anything else you think I should be reading.

I will post the final draft soon.

Adamson, Glenn Thinking Through Craft, Berg Publishing, London, 2007.

Adamson, Glenn (ed) The Craft Reader, Berg Publishing London, 2010.

Adolfy, Sandra - Neo Craft; Modernity and the Crafts, Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 2009).

Kant, Immanuel: Analytic of the Beautiful - Critique of Judgement, Hafner publishing, New York 1951.

Pye, David The Nature and Art of Workmanship, Herbert Press Ltd, 2007. (first published 1968)

Risatti, Howard, A Theory of Craft: function and aesthetic expression, University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

Sennett, Richard The Craftsman, London Penguin, 2008