Friday, December 7, 2007

Potters' symposium, Tel-Hai College, Israel


Originally trained as a painter at the academy of fine arts in Vienna, Regina Heinz discovered working with clay a few years ago as an expansion and enrichment of her previous work. She studied Ceramics in Vienna, Geneva and London, where she has been living since 1989.
Fascinated by the softness and malleability of wet clay, Regina has developed a special slab building technique to construct free standing sculptures and relief pieces for wall hanging. Slabs are rolled out and then "tailored": joined, pushed, folded, stretched and incised until the piece has taken on its final shape and expression, yet the material has retained its original softness and surface texture.

The pastel, larger-scaled sculptures that Chris Gustin has been producing for the past two or three years also start out as claycylinders on the wheel, though it would be hard to guess that onfirst glance. Technically functional as plant pots but really orna-mental, each sculpture resembles a monumental assemblage offuturist sculptures by Jean Arp or Constantin Brancusi, a compos-ite construction of ovals, cubes, bars and spheres that gyratesvertically from a relatively small base to a dramatically fuller brim.Smoky shades of green, gray, red or blue, they’re hollow inside likeany ordinary vase, and open at the top (unlike any ordinarysculpture), but perforated with drainage holes at the base foroutdoor placement on patios and in gardens.

Clive Bowen was born in 1943 and brought up in Cardiff. In the early sixties he enrolled at Cardiff College of Art to study painting and etching. A chance meeting in London with David Leach's brother Michael in 1965 led to a four year apprenticeship in the latter's workshop. Subsequently Clive Bowen found employment as a production thrower at a traditional pottery in Devon
The anonymous discipline of making humble, useful domestic things by hand, far from discouraging him, proved a source of inspiration. This he took with him when, with the encouragement and advice of Michael Cardew, he founded his own workshop in a run-down Devon dairy-farmhouse in 1971. His large two chamber kiln, made from local second-hand brick, is fired every two weeks with wood from a nearby sawmill. Virtually all his materials are from the surrounding region, to the point that the red clay he uses for slip trailing comes from his own back garden
(for hebrew click HERE)
...some more pictures from Shlomo Edan

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