ART PODCASTS
Like most ceramic artists, Bev Bell-Hughes began by making functional slipware, producing cups, saucers, pots and suchlike and selling them in markets in London. At Harrow art school, she began intuitively pinching the clay, a technique she has refined and which is in abundant evidence at her latest exhibition of 45 new works at London’s Contemporary Ceramics Centre entitled Tidal Echo. Continue reading “Tidal Echo – Bev Bell-Hughes”
Like so much good art, ceramicist James Oughtibridge’s work only begins with a vague idea of what he wants to end up with. His sculptures grow and evolve from slabs of clay to round, curvaceous forms in which perspectives change and deceive around undulations, peaks and troughs defined by sometimes smooth, sometimes sharp edges. There are openings like blowholes, spheres resembling bubbles with a certain lightness enhanced by the interplay of light and shadow that contradicts the weight of the medium. Continue reading “James Oughtibridge – Ebb and Flow”
The London Open 2018, which was launched on Thursday at The Whitechapel Gallery, claims to feature some of the best contemporary art around by those resident in the capital. It happens every three years in a tradition dating back to 1932. Its judging panel, including the Gallery’s Emily Butler, whittled 2,600 applications down to those representing just 22 artists. They were chosen not only for the quality of their work, but also for representing various themes current in London over the past three years and for having a long-term engagement with their subject matter. Continue reading “The London Open 2018”
Surrealism has come to Islington in a most macabre form as the James Freeman Gallery exhibits two masters of the contemporary style of the genre in Carolein Smit and Ray Caesar. The pair are quite unalike and work in different media. Yet both share a penchant for unsettling the viewer with images intended to disturb. They also both reference art history in their own ways. Continue reading “Carolein Smit and Ray Caesar”
A generation ago, the word “potter” had something of the pejorative about it – a person who churned out functional ware for the table and so forth. Times have changed as potters, or ceramicists if you prefer, are creating works that are as deserving of the label “art” as anything else in the contemporary field. Ask Grayson Perry who still calls himself a potter. Continue reading “Ceramic Art, London 2018”
Considering Art 