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
You are warmly invited to our annual winter Open Studios, a unique opportunity to meet and buy directly from ceramics and pottery makers who base their practice in Deptford.
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.
Delighted to share information about Fred’s next show. We have been working with Fred for 2 years of him being based in our studio. Come down to New Art Projects to see his new show alongside Dylan Meade and Sue Tilley.
Fredrik Andersson is a ceramicist and illustrator who makes colourful ceramic pieces about homo eroticism and desire, since graduating from university he has regularly shown his ceramics and is stocked by Liberties of London. He has also worked with and run projects with Positive East, and The Outside Project. During the Transformations exhibitions by Dylan Meade and Sue Tilley, Andersson will exhibit some unique ceramic pieces and examples of his contemporary take on sgraffito entitled “graffito”.
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.
These pieces were made at the workshop with The Voice of Domestic Workers we co-organised with Cubitt Gallery.
The Voice of Domestic Workers is an education and campaigning group for justice and rights for Britain’s tens of thousands foreign domestic workers that work for the wealthiest residents of London. Apart from providing support to individuals in difficult situation the group seeks to end discrimination and protect migrant domestic workers living in the UK by providing or assisting in the provision of education, training, healthcare and legal advice.
At the workshop we made and decorated simple terracotta pots, listened to the stories and shared a Malaysian rice cooked by Yasmin, one of the domestic workers. One can read group’s slogans and names of the participants on the pots that carry their presence and mood as a group. We are privileged to have met the group and to host their work in the studio while they are patiently waiting for it. We hope these pieces may inspire you making your own pottery and sculpture differently.
Visit their website to find out more about their work and help us support them.
We are delighted to participate in Structures That Cooperate: Get Paid! in January 2019. Please see the copy of the information from Cubitt, and check out the special programme website for more information.
Structures That Cooperate: Get Paid!
Private View: Thurs 17 Jan 2019 6.30–8.30pm
Cultural Capital Cooperative Object #2 (CCCO#2) produced by artists Nikita Gale, Candice Lin, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Nour Mobarak, Blaine O’Neill, and Patrick Staff, Black Obsidian Sound System (B.O.S.S) and Ceramics Studio Co-op and events with COOP Fund and Cooperative Lunch #2 hosted by Cooperativas de Alimentos
Open: 18 Jan–24 Feb 2019, Wed–Sun, 12–6pm
Events: Cooperative Lunch #2 hosted by Cooperativas de Alimentos: Sun 24, Feb 1–3pm COOP Fund: Sat 16 Feb, 3–5pm
Structures That Cooperate reopens for 2019 with a second configuration of the space designed by Mexico City-based artist Clemence Seilles. It will host newly installed work in the gallery and an ongoing public programme under the title Get Paid!
Structures That Cooperate: Get Paid! presents artworks, events and projects operating with politicised models of economy and organisation. These include Cultural Capital Cooperative Object #2 (CCCO#2) a cooperatively produced and owned film by produced by artists Nikita Gale, Candice Lin, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Nour Mobarak, Blaine O’Neill, and Patrick Staff amplified by the Black Obsidian Sound System (B.O.S.S) installed alongside works from the Ceramics Studio Co-op, London.
In continuation of a format established in October, where Cubitt’s gallery is used for an extended schedule of events, commissions, research and exhibitions, Get Paid! will present work across several formats and timeframes
For a 12-month period Cubitt will be licensing the CCCO#2 film as a process of dialogue and support of the Cultural Capital Cooperative group. CCCO#2 will be installed in the gallery for Get Paid! inviting Black Obsidian Sound System to amplify the sound of the film for the opening night. Black Obsidian Sound System is a collectively made and owned sound system established in the summer of 2018 with the intention of bringing together a community of queer, trans and non binary people of colour involved in art, sound and radical activism.
After CCCO#2’s public installation in the gallery, the film will be available to view at Cubitt by appointment until December 2019, alongside a template of the CCC license agreement. This agreement will be made available as a free download from the Cubitt website as a resource for others, to be adapted and used in support of future cooperative art production.
Into this context, Get Paid! invites another cooperative, Ceramics Studio Co-op an artist-run worker co-operative in south London. Ceramics Studio Co-op will present a selection of works for sale by its members and, as part of a longer term conversation, are working with The Voice of Domestic Workers towards the production of a new collaborative ceramic work for sale later in 2019.
Ongoing collaborations include working with Clemence Seilles on the scenography of the gallery space, The Voice of Domestic Workers in residence, Schooling & Culture at AMSI and research with W.A.G.E.
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Structures that Cooperate is a programme of projects that began October 2018 that talk to Cubitt’s context as an artist-run co-operative. It is a call to question default approaches to programming a gallery space, looking instead to collective formats, imaginaries and realities.
Projects and artists who will feature in the 2019 programme include: Ain Bailey, Lucy Clout, Deborah Findlater, Aya Haidar with The Voice of Domestic Workers and Women for Refugee Women, Adelita Husni-Bey, Schooling & Culture with Arts and Media School Islington, Serena Lee, W.A.G.E, Cubitt’s Education programme and more to be announced.
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.
There are few more days to see this lovely show in Copeland Park in Peckham.
