It’s a beautiful sping in London, and it is a very good season to see some ceramics shows. Our very favourite special is Holly Stevenson’s artwork in Freud Museum. We worked closely with the artist at the start of her ceramics journey, and it feels like a very special celebration of her masterful focus and dedication to the art of clay and glaze.
Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeurat Wallace Collection. The exhibition includes ceramics, tapestries, furniture and collage, displayed alongside some of the Wallace Collection’s masterpieces. 28 March-26 October 2025
Holly Stevenson: Tracing the Irretraceable at Freud Museum. The exhibition presents Stevenson’s ceramic sculptures dedicated to reading Freud through his personal collection of objects. 14 May 2025 to 29 June 2025
Self-Made: Reshaping Identities at Foundling Museum. An exhibition of contemporary ceramics reflecting on the complexities of identity and self-creation. 15 Nov 2024 – 1 Jun 2025
The Whole World In Our Hands at The Stephen Lawrence Galleryunites six UK-based women artists who use clay as a medium to reveal, rupture, resist, and reconnect. April 12, 2025 – 17 May, 2025
Congratulations to our studio member Lesley Boerio, her work is in the window display at Selfridges at Oxford Street this month. What a beautiful way to celebrate ceramics!
Lesley Boerio, L&Clay Ceramics, image is by Lesley Boerio, 2025
We are very pleased to invite you to visit Holly Stevenson’s solo show at Sid Motion Gallery. Holly spent a signifiant amount of time developing her ceramics practice in our studio with support of the coop team, and only recently moved on to run her own space. It is humbling for us to see how her practice thrives, and we are just delighted to have had this opportunity to work together.
Holly Stevenson (b. Norfolk, UK) makes fluid ceramic forms that explore Sigmund Freud’s favourite ashtray and last cigar as an analytical metaphor. Her sculptural ‘pots’ diligently embody the ashtray and cigar, as though they were two gendered male and female forms, as the artist reconfigures them into a clay language of her own. She graduated from Chelsea College of Art and Design Fine Art MA in 2011 with the generous help of the Stanley Picker Foundation. Her graduate degree show featured in The Creative Cities Collection, Beijing and The Catlin Guide. She was awarded the MFI Flat Time House Graduate Award, supported by the John Latham Foundation and has held a Guest Fellowship at UAL. Recently she was selected for the Mother Art Prize 2020, Cromwell Place, awarded a New Commission by Procreate Project funded by the Arts Council England and has shown work at Art Basel OVR | Portals. Holly Stevenson lives and works in London.
Exhibition open on Friday and Saturday afternoons, 1pm to 5pm
Holly Stevenson, Get Well Soon, 2019
Caroline Fisher Projects is delighted to present the work of ceramicists, Lydia Hardwick and Holly Stevenson
Lydia Hardwick
graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2013. Using surface
techniques, such as inlaying and slip decorating, her working methods
are meditative and intuitive, developed through an understanding of
materials gained over years of working with clay.
Hardwick
is drawn to patterns and motifs found within indigenous craft objects
and textiles, made by communities that attribute great expressive power
to visual things. Intrigued by the mysterious formal vocabulary of folk
geometry, she combines a myriad of making traditions with influences
from European art and design to produce work that aims to reconnect us
to an ancient appreciation of line, surface, tone and texture as
presences unto themselves.
At Caroline Fisher Projects,
traditional ceramic forms will be exhibited alongside abstract material
experiments. Pots, forms that are intrinsic to human creativity, adorned
with pattern will be placed throughout the space, alongside relief
palm-sized ‘swatches’ of clay arranged on the walls of the gallery. The
work will act as a series of meditations on the illusive nature of
meaning in visual things, reawakening personal experiences of place,
pattern and surface.
In 2015, Hardwick collaborated and exhibited with the Turner Prize winning group, Assemble
and showed in the Beazley ‘Designs of the Year’ exhibition at London’s
Design Museum. She is a qualified teacher, regularly delivering
workshops at the Royal Academy of Arts, Whitechapel Gallery and Camden
Arts Centre, London. In 2016 her work with Assemble was acquired by the V&A for their collection.
Holly Stevenson’s
ceramic practice is informed by an intense interest in psychoanalysis
and her sculpture explores how shape and colour might suggest embodied
narratives.
Her ongoing studio project entitled ‘Freud’s
Ashtray’ is inspired by Sigmund Freud’s favourite marble ashtray, still
to be found on his desk at the Freud Museum in Hampstead. The feminine
shaped ovular artefact equipped with the remains of a cylindrical
phallic cigar provide the two modest forms, the oval and the cylinder,
that the artist repeatedly recreates in clay as the foundation stones to
her work. Within the hand built bulging surreal forms meaning becomes
contained: Clay shapes up to take on characters, often adorned with
chains and flowers, so that Narcissus’ pools and Uncanny bouquets develop into brightly glazed ceramic compositions reflecting on tales of quirky bodies, femininity and sensuality.
Stevenson
started to work obsessively with clay in 2016, after a guest residency
in Sichuan, China. She graduated from the Chelsea College of Art and
Design MFA in 2011 with the generous help of the Stanley Picker
Foundation and is currently a resident artist in the Ceramics Studio
Co-op, London. Her work has been shown widely in the UK, Cubitt, The
Barbican, Zabludowicz Collection, Flat Time House, John Latham
Foundation and Gazelli Art House amongst others, as well as in China and
Italy.
Caroline Fisher Projects encourages artists working in clay and other media to realise innovative work that pushes the boundaries of these disciplines.
Over recent years there has been a questioning of the role of ceramic practice within art and craft.
Can a functional object also be an art work? What is the status of making in an art world increasingly obsessed with ideas? How will a new generation of artists learn about ceramic techniques now that there are so few higher level courses that focus on these? How can clay be combined with other media such as film, photography, performance, music and food?
The first floor space at 93a Upper St Giles’ Street, Norwich is an exhibition space but also hosts a ‘Clay Conversation’ on the first Friday of the month at 11am during exhibitions. All welcome to attend.
Bella Easton – Winner of Jerwood London Original Print Fair Award
We are very proud to share that artist and printmaker working in ceramics Bella Easton received Jerwood London Original Print Fair Award of £10,000 for the piece of work we helped her to produce. Well done Bella.
You can see the celebrated lithograph on porcelain panels called ANGEL HEART in Royal Academy during Summer exhibition.
We have been firing more work Esther Neslen’s collaborative work
These pieces were produced by school and nursery children under skilful supervision by artist Esther. Here they are downstairs ready to be taken away for assembling. 2 out of 10 human-size persons. Brilliant and challenging project!
The inaugural show at the gallery, this exhibition casts a celebratory and inquisitive eye over painting today. Combining original work by eight artists concerned with employing paint to express their own particular narratives, this exhibition centers on the power of painting in the digitally connected 21st Century.
Curated by one of the artists on Smith’s roster, David Surman, the exhibition asks the question “Why paint? Who needs painting?” in a world that seems to have evolved so far beyond the medium in terms of artistic possibilities.
The exhibition features artworks from Matija Bobičić (b. 1987, Slovenia), Tim Garwood (b. 1984, UK), Kate Groobey (b. 1979, UK), Aly Helyer (b. 1965, UK), Doppel Kim (b. 1985, Korea), Sandra Lane (b. 1954, UK), Jonathan McCree (b. 1963, UK), Daisy Parris (b. 1993, UK), Maïa Régis (b.1995, France).
Featuring paintings and painted ceramics, the works pursue an array of ideas from the historical and architectural to human existence and identity. The challenges and interplays of paint are seen through visceral brushstrokes in a preoccupation with surface in some works and with subject in others. Some subjects are crudely drawn and almost childlike whilst others dissolve and disappear under layers of texture. Gestural figuration to total abstraction, the paint transforms, delights and teaches us about this new energy in a snapshot of the quality of the painting landscape today.
There are few more days to see this lovely show in Copeland Park in Peckham.
One of the current studio members Sandra Lane had been working towards it for the last several month.
Our team were very pleased to join the opening yesterday, and see pieces we have helped to produce in action. It is always exciting for us to see how artists use ceramics alongside other techniques, and Sandra’s work is a really joyful example of it.
Sculpture, 2D and moving image work
.
PV Thursday 10th May 6-9pm
. Art Hub Gallery
5-9 Creekside Deptford
SE8 4SA
Some of the work on show had been fired in Ceramics Studio Co-op, with help of our firing technicians. Contact us if you would like to know more about using our kilns.
Recent artwork and pottery by your ceramics educators and kiln ladies
As a part of Telegraph Hill Festival Open Studios Anna Baskakova, Lenka Kalafutova, and Tatiana Baskakova will present a small garden exhibition bringing together their recent pieces focusing on the exploration of body and ceramics as a medium.
Lenka Kalafutova will show several mural pieces from Bleach me, a collaborative project with poet Adae and graphic designer Dusan Kacan, which stems from a personal desire to understand the experiences of queer persons and people of colour in different cultural contexts. Murals focusing on whiteness as a commercial ideal and erasure of identity came about as a part of this conversation.
Anna Baskakova’s work have been reflecting on the fragility of body, and human resilience despite existing in the context of societal oppression and gendered relations. She works combining clays and colour slips to create pieces that explore material tension and illusions of delicacy.
Tatiana Baskakova’s recent work continues on-going experiential research into materiality of the body and culture of community boxing. Artist’s body and ceramics sculpture are the dominant mediums to continue investigating matters of embodiment, gender and violence in sport. She will show new skipping rope pieces and performance work.
Most recent handmade ceramic wares made by Ceramics Studio Co-op members will be available for sale.
More information about Telegraph Hill Festival, and the Open Studios are on the festival website
There are few more days to see this lovely show in Copeland Park in Peckham.
