All works above by and photographs courtesy of Almeda Pottery.
Potters tend to be size queens, the scale limitations of a kiln make them obsessed with how big something is. That does not bother Jon Almeda. His Tacoma, WA studio, Almeda Pottery, is uninhibited about its commitment to tiny. Average height of his works is 1 inch.
Martin Puryear, Drawing for Untitled, ca. 2009. Compressed charcoal on ivory wove paper. Courtesy of the artist. © Martin Puryear, Courtesy Matthew Marks. Click to see a larger image.
Martin Puryear is a long-time ceramic fan (his wife was the studio assistant to Ruth Duckworth). We recently came across this superb drawing (below) of an upside-down pot from the Morgan Library’s exhibition Martin Puryear: Multiple Dimensions (New York, October 9, 2015 – January 10, 2016. “We learn from this exhibition that Martin Puryear’s gracefully carefully handmade three-dimensional objects have their origins in explorations on paper that show him working and reworking key concepts and themes,” said Colin B. Bailey, director of the Morgan Library & Museum. “The graphic is central to his creative approach, and the works in the exhibition offer an exciting, often surprising, perspective on this important contemporary artist.”
Posted on Facebook by Lori Jeanna Forsley.
We thank Lori Jeanna Forsley for this amusing graphic about the medical benefits of ceramics. Setting aside the humor, this is more true than not. After World War I Glen Lukesn, potter and pioneering educator at the University of Southern California, used pottery classes to rehabilitate traumatized veterans. There were no commercially available wheels so he converted sewing machines!
Edmund De Wall in his studio, portrait by Jack Davidson for New York Times. Click to see a larger image.
In a lengthy interview in the New York Times about Edmund De Waal’s new book, The White Road that documents porcelain’s journey, the writer Sam Anderson notes: ” the substance’s unexpectedly dramatic voyage, over the last 1,000 years, from one magic white hill in China, the original source of the clay, to the rest of the clamoring world: Versailles, Dresden, England and even concentration camps in Germany. (Hitler was one of history’s many porcelain-obsessed megalomaniacs.) Coming from a more orthodox mind, de Waal’s stories, and his pots, might have turned out to be dull, dry, obscure, conventional and neatly contained. Instead, they are poetic and sprawling. ‘‘The White Road’’ is a verbal extension of his lifelong work in ceramics. The writing and the porcelain are inseparable now; they lean on one another like the inside and outside of a pot”. cfile.daily will be reviewing this book. Until then you might want to reference The Guardian’s take on this 400-page volume.
Anthony Gucciardi, created Natural Society to focus on horror stories in dealing with the current medical establishment and promoting natural alternatives that doctors said would never work, His journey with co-Founder Mike Barrett ultimately led to the creation of Natural Society in late 2011. In this email blast they promote the ceramic coffee vessel as a means of saving 6,590,000 trees every year. That will work well unless they are wood-fired vessels. Life is complex and consequences can be unintended!
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