Tag Archives: Ceramic art

22 August 4
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Kate D. MacDowell sculpting nature’s love

Casualty

From teaching high school students to producing websites for hi-tech companies, and from meditation retreat in rural India to getting inspiration from Italian Renaissance, Kate D. MacDowell eventually settled on creating ceramic masterpieces.

Kate’s hand-built porcelain sculptures are in part responses to environmental threats and their consequences, revealing the rifts and frictions in the union between man and nature. They also borrow from myth, art history, figures of speech and other cultural touchstones. Her work has been shown throughout the US, and in Japan, the U.K. and Europe and in the Art Amsterdam, Art Hamptons, and NEXT Chicago contemporary art fairs.

She won several national clay awards in 2008 and 2009 including Best of Show for Feats of Clay, the NICHE awards (Hand built Ceramics), an Award of Excellence for CraftForms , first prize for Viewpoint: Ceramics , and first prize for Clay? II . In 2007 she was given full funding summer scholarships to the Penland School for Crafts and the Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts. Her images have been published in 500 Ceramic Sculptures, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Calle20 (Spain), O.K. Periodicals (Netherlands), Creative Review (UK), Ceramics Monthly, and Hi-Fructose and online at notcot.org, formfiftyfive.com, abduzeedo.com, treehugger.com, juxtapoz.com, beautifuldecay.com, and many other sites. She recently exhibited in the NCECA Invitational exhibition “Earth Matters” in Philadelphia in spring 2010.

Catch

Goodbye Kiss

View more of Kate’s work here

Art, Arts, Ceramic, Ceramic art, Ceramics, Environment, Inspiration, Kate D. MacDowell, Mother Nature, Nature, Porcelain, Pottery, Visual arts

17 January Share your
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Ceramic autopsy by Beccy Ridsdel

Under - Art, Inspiration

Some of the best ceramic works I came across lately. With 10 years of experience as ceramics technician at York College and having discovered her love of bone china and porcelain, Beccy Ridsdel is exploring new possibilities in mixed media ceramics.

I asked Beccy for her thoughts behind her work:

My art/craft work is a wry look at the way ceramics is perceived in the art world. Most people see working with mud as craft through and through, and this work is a dissection of the craft object in the form of domestic ware. The dissector is trying to find something else beneath the surface but every time they cut chintz, crochet and needlework spills out. This work was part of an installation, with a pile of uncut ceramics to the left of a large table, dissection in progress in the centre (complete with microscope, forceps, surgical needles and a kidney bowl). To the right was a pile of cut, tortured ceramics, all displaying their crafty interior.

Much of my work is decorative, made in response to my chosen themes. My desire work, the porcelain with knitten wool, is based on the theme of looking closely at the forgotten or ignored to find something magical. Barnacles are largely insignificant but when you look closely at them, you see that their lives revolve around desire – desire for food, procreation and light.