Category: ceramics

Amanda Shelsher

Ceramic Sculpture by Amanda Shelsher

Amanda Shelsher (born 1971,Western Australia) works as a full time sculptural ceramic artist from her home in, in Perth Western Australia. She grew up surrounded by bush in the small suburb of Gooseberry Hill and was introduced to clay at the age of 10 when her mother began her own career as a professional potter. Surrounded by both an artistic mother and father, Amanda was drawn into the world of ceramics and was firing and glazing works from this early age.

Amanda began exhibiting at age 18 and went on to complete a Bachelor of Arts in Visual Arts – Ceramics at Western Australia’s Curtin University of Technology. She then completed her Graduate Diploma of Education (Art – Secondary) the following year in 1992.

Deer Head Mask

The Deer Head Mask Of Mexico

Fanciful headdresses were an essential component of performance costumes because they were crucial to the dancers’ perceived transformation into the personage or spirit being in whose guise they performed. In Veracruz, figurines depicting warriors and a wide variety of performers often wear full-head masks, which can be removed to reveal the person inside, such as the amazingly detailed head-mask of a deer.

Post-fire paint adorns the animal, with black-line curvilinear motifs on his long ear and bright blue-green pigment embellishing his upper lip. Large protuberances on his snout and the single horn atop his head suggest a composite zoomorph rather than a biologically accurate rendering.

The deer was an important Mesoamerican food source, and its hide was used for a variety of purposes including the wrapping of ritual bundles and as leaves (pages) for screen-fold manuscripts which contained all manner of knowledge-from history to religious mythology to astrology and astronomy. The deer also was the animal spirit form of the mother of the seminal Mexican deity Quetzalcoatl and of the wife of the maize god among the Classic Maya.

Eric Astoul

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Ceramics by Eric Astoul

Associated with the ceramicist community of La Borne in central France, known for its distinct stoneware, Eric Astoul creates decorative earthenware vases and pots, as well as stone sculptures that contain rough geometrical forms and shapes. Astoul has traveled extensively throughout Europe and Africa, and is influenced by both the ancient and modern ceramics he has encountered in those continents. To create his stoneware, which features textured surfaces and both angular and curvilinear forms, he fires each piece for eight days in a wood-burning “Anagama” kiln, only the second of its kind in La Borne.

Alfred Stellmacher

Alfred Stellmacher, “Amphora Dragon Vase”

Born in the small town of Steinheid, Germany, Alfred Stellmacher worked in ceramic factories in the area, mastering his craft. He founded his first porcelain factory in 1876 at Turn, Slovenia, which produced porcelain flowers. Stellmacher developed, during the 1870s, a mew ceramic material known as ivory porcelain due to its yellow shade and matte finish. This allowed the artist to develop more complex modeling and detailing of shapes.

At the Paris World Exhibition in 1889, Alfred Stellmacher received the Gold Medal for his works. He helped form a new company in 1892, known as ‘Amphora I”, a division of the Reissner, Stellmacher & Kessel porcelain factory in Turn. The company’s goal was to create luxury porcelain objects. A collection from the company received the highest award at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago and, later, the Gold Medal at the San Francisco Exhibition. Amphora I received numerous awards for its work from 1893 to 1904, at which time the main designers left to form their own separate firms.

Ilona Romule

Ceramics by Ilona Romule

Ilona Romule is a studio artist from Riga, Latvia. She received her Masters of Fine Arts Degree from the Latvian Art Academy. Ilona has world-wide international recognition with her self-made plaster model moulds and slip cast porcelain sculptures. Ilona is known for her use of ironic and erotic imagery both in the form of her fine porcelain pieces and also in the surface decoration with the china paints. In ceramics Ilona is interested in the opportunity of three dimensional expression, using the scope of graphics and painting.

Traditionally she works with porcelain. Ilona supplements her sculptural works with fine painting in overglaze technique, thus developing plastically expressive compositions, participated by human, animal and peculiar hybrid figures. In the motives chosen by the artist, figures settle in form and material in the game of symbols and character situations.

Ceramic Rabbits

Ceramic Rabbit Sculptures

The Rabbit is the fourth in the 12-year cycle of animals which appear in the Chinese zodiac related to the Chinese calendar. The Year of the Rabbit is associated with the Earthly Branch symbol. The next Year of the Rabbit is 2023, starting on January 22.

Artists from Top to Bottom: John Morton; Tricia Kline; Cindy Billingsley; Russell Wrankle; Cindy Billingsley; Beth Cavener; Kate MacDowell; Ariel Bowman; Troy Neiman.

Jun Kaneko

Ceramics by Jun Kaneko

In 1942 Jun Kaneko was born in Nagoya, Japan, where he studied painting during his high school years. He came to the United States in 1963 to continue those studies at Chouinard Institute of Art when his focus was drawn to sculptural ceramics through his introduction to Fred Marer. He studied with Peter Voulkos, Paul Soldner, and Jerry Rothman in California during the time now defined as the contemporary ceramics movement.

Kaneko established his third studio in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1990 where he primarily works. He has also created work in several experimental studios including European Ceramic Work Center, Otsuka Omi Ceramic Company, Fabric Workshop, Bullseye Glass and A.S.A.P. He created series of large-scale sculptures from 1982-1983 at his Omaha Project, from 1992-1994 at his Fremont Project in California and currently at his Mission Clay Project in Kansas. He produced a large Dango series of ceramic pieces resembling vases without openings. (Dango means “dumpling” or “closed form” in Japanese.) His prolific roster of diverse work appears in numerous international solo and group exhibitions annually.

Kaneko’s technique involves the use of masking tape and colored slips, which he uses to covers free-standing ceramic forms and wall-hung pieces with graphic motifs and markings. He frequently favors the large oval plate as one his sculptural formats, which serves as a canvas for arrangements of straight, curving, and spiraling lines, creating an interplay of abstract imagery on a three-dimensional surface.

My thanks to http://laoguang.tumblr.com for sharing this artist. Visit his blog for more images.

Nuala O’Donovan

Nuala O’Donovan, Sculptural Ceramics

Nuala O’Donovan is an artist working in sculptural ceramics. She was born in Cork City, Ireland. She completed BA in Three-Dimensional Design at Middlesex University in the United Kingdom and studied ceramics at the Crawford Collage of Art and Design graduating with an MA.

These sculptural ceramics combine regular pattern with the characteristics of irregular forms from nature. “The patterns are regularly irregular,” she says. Each part of the pattern is individually made. It takes over a period of weeks or months to construct the form. Nuala is strongly inspired by the history behind every scarred or broken surface.  Imperfections are evidence of life force in living organisms. So her work evokes the transient value of living organisms, linking traces of history, the present and the future.

Jason Hess

Jason Hess, Ceramics

Ceramic artist Jason Hess uses a variety of clay materials, firing his pieces, generally unglazed, in a wood burning kiln. His work is either utilitarian or refers to utility in form. In his more sculptural work, he seeks to group pieces that evoke characters relating to one another.

Jason holds an MFA in ceramics from Utah State University and is currently a professor of art at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. His ceramic art has been featured in many exhibitions nationally and internationally. The artist has participated in residencies at Montana’s Archie Bray Foundation and at The Pottery Workshop in Jingdezhen, China.

Tembladera Feline-Head Bottle

Tembladera Feline-Head Bottle, Ceramic, 9th-5th Century BC, Peru

Ceramic vessels made up a large percentage of mortuary offerings in ancient Peru. Early fine examples were fired to create muted, matte tones of gray, black, and tan, with highly polished or incised surfaces. This tall bottle, with its well-preserved surface paint, is said to come from the area known as Tembladera in the Jequetepeque Valley of northern Peru. A modeled, stylized feline head in profile is worked on the front. The head is upended, and the long, conventionalized snout has teeth that continue almost to the top of the “nose.” A looped-over tongue projects from the mouth. A smaller feline profile appears on the opposite side of the bottle. The feline associations are probably those of the jaguar, the most impressive wild cat of the Americas and one long revered in ancient times for its prowess.

Beth Cavener Stichter and Alessandro Gallo

Beth Cavener Stichter and Alessandro Gallo, “Tangled Up in You”, Ceramic, 2014

Beth Cavener Stichter’s sculptures have an intensely-visceral quality. The ceramic animals she hand-builds demonstrate an human-like sense of understanding with their sensitive gazes and anthropomorphic eyes. But despite their thoughtful countenances, these characters are also perfectly at home in their animal skins. Cavener Stichter’s work does not shy away from the brutality of the animal world, from its untamed sexuality to its endless cycle of predator and prey.

Stichter recently collaborated with Italian artist Alessandro Gallo, who embellished her latest sculpture, “Tangled Up in You”, with painted tattoos reminiscent of traditional Japanese tattoo art. The 65-inch-tall sculpture (15 feet total, from the top knot of the rope to the floor) shows a lanky rabbit intertwined with a snake in mid-air. It is unclear whether the two figures are caught in a struggle to the death or a passionate embrace.