Ceramics this month

April 2008: Must-see exhibitions, workshops and opportunities. Morsels of other happenings and feature articles.

Featured: Cerartmix: judge's statement
"Ceramics is a term universally understood to describe any object or artefact made of fired clay (earth). However, if asked to define what art is, one would be hard-pressed to provide a singularly encompassing definition, particularly within a contemporary context." Ah Xian is the judge for the 2008 Sidney Myer Fund International Ceramics Award. Read his catalogue essay and view images of winning works.

Read Ceramics this month

12 March, 2008

Creative Drawing with John Lethbridge

Interested in a drawing experience? On May 3 & 4, John Lethbridge will run a creative drawing workshop weekend. Lethbridge is a professional artist and was a founding academic of Sydney College of the Arts, Sydney University where he worked for twenty years. SCA is one of the four top art colleges in the world. For the last ten years he has concentrated his own research into the psychological origins of the creative impulse and has developed a unique method of teaching his understanding through the medium of creative drawing.

Having been in Lethbridge's previous workshops myself, I give this the big thumbs up. Not to be missed. Bookings.

11 January, 2008

Proposed closure of the Glasgow School of Art Ceramics Department

Dear All,

I'm writing to all of you today, to ask for your support regarding the Glasgow School of Art Ceramics Department in Scotland, UK.

I have just received news that the Head of the School of Design, Professor Irene McAra McWilliam, announced to the student body today that the school is to stop accepting enrollments from new students in ceramics, with a view to closing the department down.

The official reason for the closure is that the department has not received enough interest from prospective students for keeping it running to remain a viable option. This, however, seems incorrect, as always in the past there have been more new applicants than places available.

With the recent amalgamation of the Ceramics Department at the Edinburgh College of Art with the Sculpture Department, it appears that all options for skills based degrees for ceramic artists in Scotland are being closed.

I have recently moved to Scotland and have been deeply involved with the Glasgow School of Art Ceramics Department while studying for my MPhil degree in Ceramics through the Australian National University. Indeed, the ANU has had a long standing exchange and working relationship with the Glasgow School of Art, as have many other institutions throughout the world.

Read more, give support .... e2r ceramics by Emilka Radlinska

December, 2007 - A years farewell

It's been a pretty busy year. I've been very fortunate and given opportnities to work with some pretty amazing people, travel and be invited to participate in 3 international exhibitions. The first for the year came via Carole Epp. Carole and I know one another from the Ceramic Department at the ANU and exhibited together in Smoke Free Zone, (held in association with the international conference Gundaroo Woodfire 2005).

During this same period a group of us had got to know one another and found we were strongly committed to ceramics and moving into the area of craft and research. We all came from various parts of Australia and Canada. Carole curated the exhibition Convergence: A north south discourse and it was accepted as part of the 2007 National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA), 41st Annual Conference Old Currents/New Blends: A Distillation of Art and Geography, in Louisville, Kentucky. This amazing group of artists and friends are Carole Epp, Lia Tajcnar, Maiju Altpere-Woodhead, Anna Gianakis, Mel Robson, Sarah Rice, Jo Searle, and Emilka Radlinska.

Having the exhibition accepted as part of the NCECA conference was pretty exciting. Then came the opportunity to travel to the conference with the ANU to help out on the trade fair booth. I was also able to give an artists presentation at the International Slide Series.
  » Images Convergence: A north south discourse
  » NCECA website

Next came Darwin. As Communications Manager at Craft Australia I attended a three day meeting in Darwin at the time of the 24th National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award opening. The inaugural Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair and the Darwin Festival were also on and I attended exhibitions openings and made numerous gallery visits. It was my first time to the NT and I really loved the energy of the place. It's on my wish list to return to stay awhile and do a research project.

During this time I was working on was a proposal for the international craft conference, New Craft-Future Voices to be held in Dundee in July. It looked like an amazing conference to be part of with one of it's aims to bring together craft practitioners and academics to develop a new vision for the 21st Century. The conference arose from a major AHRC grant and "sought to capture the diversity of activities within the crafts and take stock of its fast changing cultural and creative role'.

Maiju Altpere-Woodhead, Anna Gianakis, Anita McIntyre and I, started the process by meeting as a group every three to four weeks. We would get together at a café and chat over coffee or a glass of wine – or more often than not, both. Over the weeks we talked concepts and ideas, our backgrounds, and our materials and processes. What emerged was the framework for the exhibition proposal. The selection process was rigorous and highly competitive. A web-based procedure of ‘visible reviewing’ was adopted with a panel of international referees reviewing the submissions. The time between our first get together to consider submitting a proposal and our receiving notification of acceptance was about 8 months.

It was a tremendous amount of work and part of the learning experience was the language and research protocols. The former came as a bit of a surprise as we all thought, English being the common language, it would be easy.

The pressure of the workload had caught up with me, and although it was my intent to attend the conference, it was not possible. Our dear friend Emilka Radlinska, who is currently based at the Wasps Artist's Studios in Glasgow, attended on our behalf. Aussies, Rina Bernabei, senior lecturer in Industrial Design at the Univery of New South Wales, Sydney and Ben Richardson of Ridgeline Pottery in Tasmania also participated in the conference.
  » tracelines
  » NAVA blog
  » New Craft Future Voices website

Work from the Dreams of home series, 2007 has been selected for the 2008 Sidney Myer Fund International Ceramic Award. Judged by Ah Xian this has been an exciting high to end the year.

I have also been working on some great projects at Craft Australia. On the horizon is a new website for Craft Australia; new developments to the Research Centre and, in 2009, the conference Selling Yarns: Innovation for Sustainability which will build on the 2006 Selling Yarns conference held in Darwin.

A glass of champers with you all - to celebrate the passing of 2007 and a toast to the New Year.
Avi