BSAD Ceramics

MA Ceramics Show

Emily Harnett and Ying Sheung Wong are graduating this September, with two brilliant final shows. Two students from very different parts of the world who have become close friends and influenced each other’s work, but produced highly individual bodies of new work.

A taster below, but come along to the exhibition for the full experience – PV on Friday 22nd and then open until 27th (invitation attached).

Emily Harnett_1

Emily Harnett_2

Emily Harnett_3

Emily Harnett_4

Emily Harnett_5

Emily Harnett_6

Ying Sheung Wong_1

Ying Sheung Wong_2

Ying Sheung Wong_3

Ying Sheung Wong_4

Ying Sheung Wong_5

Ying Sheung Wong_6

Also showing: Curatorial Practice, Fashion & Textiles, Fine Art, Visual Communication.

Final digitalMAinvitePV

Making Futures

I will be giving a paper at the Making Futures conference (21 – 22 September) at Mount Edgcumbe House, over the water from Plymouth. Speaking to this strand:

Craft in an Expanded Field: in the ‘Aims & Themes’ text (above) we suggest that the global calling that contemporary craft and creative making find themselves engaged in demands their reassessment too. Certainly, the way we vacillate (at least in the West) between the terms ‘contemporary craft’, ‘artist’, ‘maker’, ‘design-to-make’, ‘neo-artisanal’, etc. appears rooted in our experience of industrialization (the Arts & Crafts reaction to it) and our unsettled position vis-a-vis the shift to a post-Fordist service economy and technological change – the spectrum of terms indexing not just uncertainties, but awareness of the opportunities (beyond the cynical marketing narratives that give us ‘craft coffee’, ‘craft ales’, and the like!) that might be emerging with respect to the as yet undetermined place of small-scale maker economies in the context the wider globalised market economy.

Either way, it seems that a broader view of contemporary craft and making practices than the one that still characteristically locates them solely within an Arts & Crafts tradition of (architecture apart) the decorative arts associated with ceramics, woodworking, glass, textiles jewellery and small-scale metal production – represents an important and necessary dimension of the task to a re-frame a progressive craft alongside a progressive Modernity.

On the one hand, echoing Rosalind Krauss’ original “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”, this extended field of craft takes it towards fine art, especially sculpture. (The movement can of course be reciprocal: the 2016 Turner Prize winning installation by the artist, Helen Martin, arguably exhibits a strong materials-led sensibility that ‘quotes’ craft). The other direction is of course towards science, technology and industry where, for example, Sennett famously spoke of the craft of Linux programmers, Crawford that of motorcycle mechanics, and where it is becoming common for medical researchers to ‘craft’ 3D individualised body parts and structures, often employing 3D printing and growing techniques that shade into biologically customised compounds manipulated at molecular levels.

We want to hear from practitioners both within and (especially) beyond art, craft and design who are working in ways that might present, or narrate, new ideas of how we might think about craft, whether or not these relate to the contemporary applied arts associated with the art school context.

http://makingfutures.plymouthart.ac.uk

Annabeth Rosen

Bogaloo.2015.web_

Annabeth Rosen: Fired, Broken, Gathered, Heaped is the artist’s first major survey and chronicles over 20 years of her work in ceramics. The exhibition will also feature works on paper that mirror the trajectory of her works created in clay.

#AnnabethRosen

For over two decades, Annabeth Rosen has demonstrably delved into the place of craft in the contemporary art landscape. Formallytrained in ceramics, Rosen has expanded her practice from the functional and decorative into expansive conceptual installations that meld materiality and process. Her diminutive and occasionally monumental works are composed through laborious and obsessive additive processes that push the medium beyond spectacle and into dialogues about endurance, labor, and feminist thought, as well as nature, destruction, and regeneration.

Rosen also sees the studio and the kiln as places of site and embraces process and chance as instrumental in the formation of her art objects. The artist rarely attempts to obscure her hand as a primary instrument and often “binds” multitudes of discrete works to create monumental objects. Twisting and shaping the clay, Rosen creates what has been described as organic forms—fragmented figurations of flowers, tubers, leaves, and root-like structures that are skillfully fired together and then arranged in large grids or as standalone works. Rosen has said of her work, “I break almost as much ceramics as I make, and I think I learn as much about the work by doing so. By being so focused on a destination for the piece, I overlook shapes and ideas. Much of the work is made with already fired parts broken, reassembled, re-glazed, and re-fired with the addition of wet clay elements if necessary. I work with a hammer and chisel, and I think of the fired pieces as being as fluid and malleable as wet clay.”

Annabeth Rosen is a pioneer in the field of contemporary ceramics, bringing fluidity to the genre and its discourse with contemporary art. Within the genre’s trajectory, the artist functions as an important link between such artist as Lynda Benglis, Mary Heilmann, Jun Kaneko, Peter Voulkos, as well as a new generation of artists working in the medium.

Annabeth Rosen: Fired, Broken, Gathered, Heaped is organized by Valerie Cassel Oliver, former Senior Curator.

http://camh.org/exhibitions/annabeth-rosen#images

52. BUNNY 2011 46 x 32 x 24