50 Famous Ceramic Artists You Should Know About – Artchive (2024)

Ceramics are materials made by heating and cooling natural and synthetic materials, primarily clay, at high temperatures to achieve desired properties such as hardness, durability, and resistance to heat and corrosion. Pottery is the process of handcrafting of useful or ornamental products from clay and other materials. Pottery has been produced for thousands of years by numerous cultures around the world.

Ceramics have been used as an art medium since ancient times. Today, many modern ceramic artists continue to use pottery to create unique and meaningful artwork. We’ve list 50 of the most famous ceramic artists below, enjoy!

1. Grayson Perry

• Born: 24 March 1960, Bicknacre, Chelmsford, Essex, England
• Nationality: British
• Notable artwork:
  • Modern Family, 2014
  • Jane Austen in E17, 2009
  • The Rosetta Vase, 2011

Grayson Perry is a contemporary English artist, writer, and broadcaster. In addition to his cross-dressing, tapestries, and ceramic vases, he is well-known for his criticism of British “prejudices, fashions, and foibles” and his assessments of the contemporary art world. Perry creates vases with classical shapes and vibrant color schemes that portray subjects that contrast with their appealing exteriors.

Perry has also worked with video, performance, printmaking, sketching, embroidery, and other textile media. Perry frequently uses mediums like weaving and ceramics, which are typically ranked lower in the hierarchy of arts than sculpture and painting. Greek pottery and folk art are among the many ceramic traditions that Perry alludes to in his work. He uses a traditional way of coiling to create his vessels. The majority feature intricate surfaces that use a variety of methods, such as “glazing, incision, embossing, and the use of photographic transfers,” which call for multiple firings. He adds sprigs—small relief sculptures adhered to the surface—to some of them.

Grayson Perry’s ceramics are distinct from craft pottery due to their complexity and high skill requirements. It has been argued that these techniques are employed to provide meaning rather than only for cosmetic impact. Perry questions the implicit belief in the craft tradition that pottery is only functional or ornamental and is incapable of expressing ideas. He employs a “guerrilla tactic” of combining several approaches, using the approachable medium of ceramics to provoke thought.

2. Ron Nagle

• Born: February 21, 1939, San Francisco, California, U.S.
• Nationality: American
• Notable artwork:
  • Drawing 9 (2011)
  • Memory (2005)
  • Sandintrance (2005)
  • Gaslighting (2018)

Ron Nagle has been a ceramicist for more than fifty years. He has worked a great deal with the vessel typology, particularly the cup, pushing past traditional craft’s utilitarian concerns into formal analysis of the material. His small-scale, intimate sculptures frequently combine several parts and a variety of methods and materials, such as polyurethane, wax, epoxy, scalp-metal, hand-molding, airbrushing, conventional and non-traditional glazing, and slip-casting. He can create forms that are more expansive than what clay can hold, thanks to these artificial materials.

Drawing is an essential part of Nagle’s process, and he approaches his work from a flat, two-dimensional perspective. This is consistent with his expressed interest in painting, for which he lists Billy Al Bengston, Cy Twombly, and Giorgio Morandi as influences. The California Clay Movement is linked to Nagle’s art, and he frequently appears in exhibitions featuring Abstract Expressionism. While Nagle has avoided being associated with the conventional ceramics trade, he has acknowledged the influence of modern ceramic sculptors like Kenneth Price and Japanese Momoyama ceramics, as well as 1940s American restaurant utensils.

3. Betty Woodman

• Born: May 14, 1930
• Died: January 2, 2018 (aged 87)
• Nationality: American
• Notable artwork:
  • Liquid Platter, base and cup, (1981)
  • On the Way to India (1988)
  • Pillow Pitcher, and Flower Vase (1993)

Betty Woodman was a renowned American ceramic artist. Woodman started as a production potter in the 1950s. Her works ranged from large-scale paintings explicitly created for a site to fragmentary columns and floor pieces that resembled carpets. She frequently used a disassembled version of the conventional clay vessel. Her unabashed pursuit of aesthetic pleasure and her embodied readings of various ancient and modern art historical traditions established her as a brazenly contemporary character whose work is illuminating in talks about gender, modernism, craft, architecture, and domesticity.

After her daughter passed away in 1981, Woodman’s career changed as her work transitioned from functional pottery to more abstract art. Woodman successfully persuaded Boulder municipal officials to fund the Pottery Lab in the 1950s, establishing it as one of the earliest recreational pottery programs in the United States. Her goal was to encourage students to pursue careers in pottery making in addition to doing it for leisure. The establishment of the Pottery Lab led to the construction of about 100 kilns in the Boulder region.

4. Edmund de Waal

• Born: 10 September 1964, Nottingham, United Kingdom
• Nationality: British
• Notable artwork:
  • Certosa III, 2015
  • Elegie, 2000
  • Lidded jar, 1997

Edmund Arthur Lowndes de Waal is an English novelist, potter, and modern artist. He is renowned for his expansive installations of porcelain vessels, frequently made in reaction to archives, collections, or the local history.

Edmund de Waal started producing his unique porcelain pieces with a celadon glaze 1993. Focusing primarily on classical vessel shapes, de Waal’s pots gradually caught the eye of the British craft industry, leading to his first exhibition at Egg London in 1995. These pots featured subtle variations in tone and texture, as well as indentations or pinches, in the style he developed while living in Japan.

De Waal’s ceramic work was greatly influenced by modernism, specifically the Bauhaus movement, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. As a result, de Waal came to believe that the materiality of porcelain may serve as a bridge between the East and the West, with the modernist ethos of the Bauhaus perhaps colliding with the ethos of China’s Song dynasty.

Since 2000, de Waal has shifted his focus from creating and displaying individual domestic vessels to creating groups of vessels and objects meant to be viewed in relation to openings and spaces. Later, he moved into wall-mounted and freestanding vitrines that are primarily filled with various quantities of his porcelain vessels, and most recently, he added various metals, metallic gilding, porcelain shards, and porcelain sheets with handwritten inscriptions.

5. Shio Kusaka

• Born: 1972
• Nationality: Japanese
• Notable artwork:
  • Three Triangle vase
  • Three pot grouping
  • Dinosaur 31 (2016).

Shio Kusaka is a ceramic artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. Kusaka learned to thoroughly examine vessels as a child by growing up in Japan and participating in her grandmother’s tea ceremonies. She came to Los Angeles in 2003, having graduated with a BFA in painting from the University of Washington in Seattle, and concentrated on clay work. Drawing and sculpture are combined by Kusaka, who usually switches between abstraction and representation. Through the use of shape, pattern, colour, and glazing processes, she has created a unique formal language that draws inspiration from the wall drawings of Sol LeWitt, the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt, and Japanese ceramics from the Yayoi period. From line patterns, grids, and dots to the more whimsical watermelon, strawberry, and dinosaur vessels, Kusaka is always visible while creating the pieces.

6. Tony Marsh

• Born: 26 May 1954, New York, United States
• Nationality: American
• Notable artwork:
  • Spill and Catch, 2022
  • New Moon Jar, 2022
  • Neo-Crucible, 2022

Tony Marsh is a ceramicist who has spent the last thirty years honing his craft on non-functional ceramic vessels. Marsh is committed to his work as an educator and an artist. From the bright and glossy glazes of Marsh’s Spill and Catch pieces to the topographic and highly textured surfaces of his Cauldrons and Crucibles series, his ceramic forms over the past twelve years are the result of his extensive research into the behavior of ceramic materials and thermal challenges. Marsh’s vessels examine the incredibly transformative character of these materials by offering a debate between gravity and the flow of molten elements through cycles of heating and cooling, figuratively referring to geophysical research and artistic forms of production. Since he doesn’t take notes during his technique, each piece is an original creation resulting from numerous firings and the haphazard addition or elimination of surface materials.

7. Kathy Butterly

• Born: 1963, Amityville, New York, United States
• Nationality: American.
• Notable artwork:
  • I Need A Minute, 2020
  • Small pitcher, 1993
  • Rabbit Hole, 2011

Kathy Butterly has been creating unique, expressive sculptures for over two decades, contributing to and developing the studio’s ceramics heritage. Butterly addresses a variety of ideas in her work, from materiality and line to the vessel’s history. She begins with classic ceramic forms, which she refers to as “canvas.” Butterly distorts and misforms these forms in ways that lean toward the iconoclastic. She then continues to glaze the pieces, sometimes going so far as to create more volume, and fires them again. Both enticing and startling are the hues and textures Butterly selects and how they interact with one another. Her peculiar shapes and unexpected color choices frequently elicit a visceral response and an unsettling awareness in the spectator.

Every sculpture created by Butterly is distinct and intricate. She avoids creating large-scale pieces, instead opting to create concise, snappy pieces that convey a diverse range of emotions. These sculptures radiate fierce and rebellious originality, whether rising, collapsing, robust, or teetering. By highlighting the figurative undertones in the vessel shape, Butterly enables the observer to connect with her works on a personal and relatable level. These sculptures’ unique, multifaceted identities give the pieces a purpose.

8. Akio Takamori

• Born: October 11, 1950, Nobeoka, Japan
• Died: January 11, 2017 (aged 66)
• Nationality: Japanese-American
• Notable artwork:
  • Owl, 1985
  • Woman, 1984
  • Summer of ’92 Vase, 1992

Akio Takamori was a pioneering figure in ceramic art, and his work over the last thirty years has had a lasting impact on Pacific Northwest arts and the medium itself. His art frequently draws autobiographically from his experiences growing up in Japan, his family, and mythological themes. He is renowned for creating figurative sculptures out of coils where the narrative painting defines the form. Takamori engaged with the history of both Eastern and Western aesthetics to investigate themes of cultural identity. His body of work is characterized by bold shape and color and is incredibly expressive of human emotion.

9. Jami Porter Lara

• Born: 1969, Spokane, Washington, United States
• Nationality: American
• Most famous artwork:
  • LDS-MHB-2LBR-0917CE-KS, 2023
  • Go On Now (Medium Rattle 2), 2022
  • TLD-MHB-AABR-0822CE-01, 2022

Jami Porter Lara is a conceptual artist intrigued by the ability of commonplace things, routines, and movements to mold and transform our environment. She challenges notions of what is natural, prominent, or common sense for subtexts and erasures using a wide range of formal techniques, including ceramic sculpture, sign-making, lithography, drawing, sewing, and embroidery. She frequently uses friction between form and material to suggest what may be meant but not said or heard. Her area of research is how people normalize human political constructions through their perception of what is natural.

Porter Lara employs methods derived from those that the Mata Ortiz potters in the area used more than 2,000 years ago to make vessels. She takes the unprocessed clay out of the ground, slaps it, filters it, and dries it until it becomes usable. She utilizes clay coils to construct the containers, polishes the pieces with a stone, and then fires them using a reduction method in a backyard pit covered in a galvanized aluminum tub. Keep oxygen and fires away from the pottery during the reduction process. The piece is surrounded by sawdust and newspaper, which releases carbon that combines with the clay to turn the containers black.

10. Andile Dyalvane

• Born: 1978, Qobo-Qobo in the Eastern Cape.
• Nationality: South African
• Notable artwork:
  • Ihobo-hobo (Cape Weaver Bird), 2023
  • iBubu (Flock), 2022
  • iNgqweji (Nest), 2022

Andile Dyalvane is a well-known ceramic artist from South Africa. Driven by a profound spiritual bond with his Xhosa ancestors, Dyalvane uses intricate, expansive ceramic creations as a symbolic medium to honor his ancestral customs and communicate his recovery process. He is able to interact with and respond to his cultural heritage via his art. In particular, Dyalvane can make objects that are both aesthetically pleasing and useful with clay.

Through the creation of custom-made, handcrafted, collectable objects, Andile Dyalvane’s studio enables him to experiment with and blend a variety of materials and processes. Frequently, ceramics are mixed with materials like wood and glass to create a finished piece that is functional. Every endeavor begins with a line—a straightforward line that honors the present, links him to the past, and serves as a reminder to himself that he must leave a legacy for future generations. This “line” translates from isiXhosa to “camagu,” which means thankfulness. Dyalvane thinks there are countless connections between him and his ancestors.

Andile Dyalvane develops and creates pieces that are embellished with abstract patterns and human forms, drawing on memories and visuals from his boyhood in the country and his adult life in the city. Every symbol and hue has a specific significance. Each hue and pattern of Dyalvane’s expertly created sculptures has significance.

11. Shawanda Corbett

• Born: 1989, New York, New York
• Nationality: American
• Notable artwork:
  • Hey, it’s all about you, 2020
  • What took you so long, 2021
  • You don’t have to pretend, 2021

Shawanda Corbett is a performance and ceramic artist whose body and architectural ceramics explore the concept of a “complete body” and convey many viewpoints from various cultures, times, and places. Her items are coated in brilliant, shiny colors and have curvatures that are created by the clay’s interactions with the artist’s body.

Shawanda examines the notion of a “complete body” in her work, employing cyborg theory to explore the various stages of a person’s existence. Corbett grounds theory in reality by drawing on her experience as a disabled woman of color. The theory of cyborgs aims to blur the lines between physical and non-physical, human and animal, and organic and synthetic. It proposes a transhuman or posthuman chimera that leverages technology to challenge essentialized, capitalist, and patriarchal systems, categories, and lives.

12. Peter Voulkos

• Born: January 29, 1924. Bozeman, Montana, US
• Died: February 16, 2002 (aged 78). Bowling Green, Ohio, US
• Nationality: American
• Notable artwork:
  • Black Butte Divide or Black Divide – Butte, 1958, fired clay.
  • Hall of justice, 1971, bronze
  • Mr. Ishi, 1970, bronze
  • Untitled (Stack), 1980, stoneware.

Peter Voulkos’s abstract expressionist ceramic sculptures are well-known for bridging the gap between fine art and ceramic crafts. He founded the ceramics departments at UC Berkeley and the Los Angeles County Art Institute.

While Voulkos’s early work was fired in gas and electric kilns, Peter Callas, who would become a close partner for the following 23 years, first introduced him to wood firing in Anagama kilns in 1979. He brought Japanese wood-firing aesthetics to the United States with the assistance of Peter Callas. His sculptures are renowned for their striking and energizing ornamentation, free-form construction, and visual weight. He would rip, pound, and gouge their surfaces while shaping. He cast bronze sculptures at one point in his career, and his early ceramic pieces were painted, glazed, or completed with brushstrokes.

Peter Voulkos’ live ceramics-sculpting sessions in which he presided over his students were also noteworthy; they showcased his refined mastery of the craft’s subtleties and his intense and unforgiving approach to working with the material. His pursuit of invention occasionally resulted in creating an electric potter’s wheel prototype and using industrial dough-mixing machinery to mix the clay.

13. Bernard Leach

• Born: 5 January 1887
• Died: 6 May 1979 (aged 92)
• Nationality: British
• Most known arts:
  • Early Fratilary Bowl, c1920s
  • Lidded Box, 1963
  • Fluted Pot, c. 1960s

Bernard Howell Leach was an English art instructor and studio potter. He is recognized as the “Father of British Studio Pottery.” In 1911, Leach began his pottery career and apprenticed under the sixth generation of Japanese potters, following Ogata Kenzan, a renowned Edo-period ceramicist from Kyoto. Leach was granted the designation of Kenzan VII, which designates the seventh generation of Kenzan potters, along with Tomimoto Kenkichi. Upon his return to England in 1920, Leach founded the Leach Pottery in St. Ives, Cornwall, alongside his friend and fellow potter, Hamada Shōji. Leach made ceramics there in the style of Asian pottery, particularly raku.

Leach supported ceramics as a synthesis of Eastern and Western ideas and arts. His creations mainly featured classic English and German slipware and salt glaze ware techniques mixed with traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean ceramics. He considered pottery a broader way of life, combining art, philosophy, design, and craft.

14. Zizipho Poswa

• Born: December 5, 1979, Mthatha, South Africa
• Nationality: South African
• Notable Artwork:
  • Mam’uNoAnswari, 2023
  • Mam’uNoMathemba, 2023
  • Mam’uNoSekshin, 2023

Zizipho Poswa, a sculptor based in Cape Town, creates audacious declarations of African womanhood and the contemporary role of Xhosa women through her large-scale ceramic and bronze creations. She co-founded Imiso Ceramics in 2005 with fellow ceramicist Andile Dyalvane, and the studio has gained recognition worldwide for its handcrafted dinnerware and vessels.

Poswa has been blending figuration and abstraction in her work for Southern Guild since 2017. She uses an intuitive vocabulary of shape, color, and texture. Her practice of naming her works after significant women in her society reflects how deeply her art invokes her journey while also paying attention to the spiritual traditions and matriarchal guardianship of her Xhosa culture.

Her first significant series honored the custom known as “umthwalo” (burden), in which women from rural areas frequently walk great distances while bearing bulky bundles of wood, pails of water, or packages on their heads. In Magodi, her second series, she explored the sculpture-like forms of traditional African hairstyles like the dreadlock and the Bantu knot, as well as the important function hair salons provide as gathering places for women. Every piece of art is named after a close friend or family member, providing the artist’s support system with a vivid, tangible form.

Twelve recognizable sculptures from Poswa’s first solo exhibition, iLobola, were created for the first time using cast bronze and hand-coiled clay. iLobola honors the spiritual sacrifice—the cow—at the center of the age-old African tradition of lobola, or bride-wealth, and the custom’s function in fostering goodwill between the two families. This series, which uses an intuitive vocabulary of shape, color, and texture, straddles the line between figuration and abstraction, much like some of Poswa’s earlier works.

15. Theaster Gates

• Born: August 28, 1973, Chicago, Illinois, US.
• Nationality: American
• Most Known arts:
  • In Case of Race Riot II (2011)
  • Facsimile Cabinet of Women Origin Stories (2018)
  • Black Chapel (2022)

Theaster Gates was inspired to become an urban designer, potter, and artist by the creative music of Black churches. Using tar, clay, and remodeled structures, Gates crafts sculptures that turn urban neighborhoods’ raw materials into drastically altered portals of possibility for the local community. By removing the components from decaying buildings and turning them into sculptures that serve as investments or bonds, Gates creates a positive feedback loop between high art and social progress. The money raised from these sales goes toward funding the restoration of entire city blocks.

16. Lucie Rie

• Born: 16 March 1902 Vienna, Austria
• Died: 1 April 1995 (aged 93), London, England
• Nationality: British
• Notable artwork:
  • Vase with Flared Rim, c. 1970s (Stoneware)
  • Spiral Vase , c. 1974 (porcelain)
  • Pink Spiral Vase, c. 1978-9 (Porcelain)

Lucie Rie was an independent British studio potter born in Austria during a period when most ceramicists were men. She is renowned for her broad technical expertise, painstakingly thorough glazing and firing experiments, and unique ornamental methods.

By transforming them into works of art, Lucie gave materials like clay, stone, and minerals a new lease on life. Unlike her peers, she was influenced by the surrounding architecture and natural surroundings rather than adhering to the rigid rules of aesthetic direction. Her innovative kiln processing and one-of-a-kind, intricate slip-glaze surface treatment influenced a generation of younger British ceramists.

17. Arlene Shechet

• Born: 1951 New York City, U.S.
• Nationality: American
• Notable artwork:
  • Winter Dusk: Together,2023
  • Grow and Glow, 2023
  • First Born, 2023

Arlene Shechet is a sculptor renowned for her ability to seamlessly integrate disparate elements, create precarious and transitory arrangements, and create visual paradoxes that push boundaries. Shechet’s sculptures appear in motion, uncovering the expressive potential of materials and forms and compelling us to sit with—and move around—their contradictions. Her gravity-defying work seems to tilt, distort, bend, and melt.

Critics characterize Shechet’s work as intuitive and technical, hybrid and polymorphous, and freely combining references, finishes, surfaces, and styles to produce paradoxical visuals. Her abstract-figurative works frequently serve as analogies for the human condition and physical experience, eloquently and humorously addressing imperfection and ambiguity. The difference between Shechet’s free-form, intuitive approach—which welcomes improvisation, mishaps, and disobedience to rules—and the systematic, technically sound approach that supports it—which includes experiments with novel glazes, fabrication, and carving—is noteworthy.

18. Yee Soo-Kyung

• Born: 1963, South Korea
• Nationality: South Korean
• Notable artwork:
  • Translated vase TVG-9, 2012
  • Translated vase TVW-6, 2008
  • Translated Vase G1, 2015

Yee Soo-Kyung is a multi-talented South Korean sculptor most recognized for her Translated Vase series, in which she creates new sculptures from broken pieces of precious Korean ceramics. Yee’s biomorphic sculptures emphasize the potential and beauty that arise from breakage. Her other drawings and installations examine psycho-spiritual introspection, cultural deconstruction, kitsch, and the fusion of modern aesthetics with traditional Korean arts and history.

Yee uses gold and glue to join broken porcelain pieces together. Her goal in joining the seemingly unrelated parts is to honor the “fateful weakness of being” rather than to cure or “fix” the items. As several viewers have suggested, there is no connection between her method and kitsugi, the Japanese technique of fixing shattered objects with gold. She chose gold because the Korean words for “gold” and “crack” are hom*onyms. She highlighted defects that Korean culture has rejected since repairing shattered vases is taboo or unlucky. Her preference for using ceramic masters’ creations, which use their distinct perspectives to link the past and present, led her to select Korean porcelain.

19. Aaron Angell

• Born: 1987, Kent UK.
• Nationality: British
• Notable artwork:
  • Frog fountain 2, 2021
  • Caterpillar engine, 2021
  • Frog, 2018

Aaron Angell focuses on hobbyist cultures, non-canonical history, and unconventional image-making techniques. He is the creator of the avant-garde and hallucinogenic Troy Town Art Pottery, a London-based ceramics studio for artists.

Aaron Angell is a ceramicist by profession, and he creates sculptural tableaux that allude to naturalistic forms, hobbyist cultures, and the British underground hand-built ceramics of the 1970s and 80s. By emphasizing ceramics as a medium for sculpture, Angell seeks to stimulate fresh perspectives on the culturally complex history of the medium and marginal modes of image formation. He is keen to add to the expanding body of knowledge on ceramics in an aesthetic context that is distinct from the conventional discourse centered on crafts.

20. Jennifer McCurdy

• Born: 1955
• Nationality: American
• Notable artwork:
  • Wheat Bottle, 2006
  • Gilded Rhythm Vessel, 2020
  • Gilded Lotus Nest, 2019

Jennifer McCurdy was fascinated with pottery under the influence of her eccentric vase-collecting grandmother, an accomplished watercolorist and floral arranger. A porcelain specialist, McCurdy produced functional items like wall sconces, mixing bowls, and mugs. She eventually started making sculptural items by removing clay fragments from the form and giving the fundamental sphere shape movement and line. She admits that she had to hone her clay-throwing skills before completing the carving. There are pleasing variances in size and shape because each of her pieces is made by hand on a potter’s wheel, changed, carved, and engraved one at a time, and then fired to cone 10 (2350 degrees).

21. Magdalena Suarez Frimkess

• Born: 1929, Caracas, Venezuela
• Nationality: Venezuelan
• Notable artwork:
  • Throwing Standing-Up Teapot, c. 1972
  • Venice Cana Vase, 2001
  • My Mother, My Father, My Brother, and Me, 2001

Magdalena Suarez is well-recognized for her cartoon figure sculptures and advertising artwork. Suarez crafts cartoon creatures, vases, and mugs that resemble sculptures and frequently feature slogans and commercials. Popeye, Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, and other Disney characters are among her most well-known works. Suarez primarily creates small-scale pieces. During her time in ceramic school, Suarez’s works were frequently perceived as unusual since they were beautiful rather than practical. In her artwork, she also incorporates Mayan and Aztec imagery.

22. Warren MacKenzie

• Born: February 16, 1924 Kansas City, Missouri
• Died: December 31, 2018 Stillwater, Minnesota
• Nationality: American
• Notable artwork:
  • Tenmoku Vase with Drawn Triangle, 2015
  • Oribe Lidded Jar, Stamped, 2015
  • Flowing White Shino Lidded Jar, stamped, 2014

Craft Potter Warren MacKenzie introduced the Mingei aesthetic to the St. Croix Valley, where it flourished after completing an apprenticeship at the Leach Pottery in 1952. He is renowned for his straightforward, pragmatic pottery made on a wheel influenced by Bernard Leach and the Japanese style found in Shoji Hamada’s creations.

In his extensive work, Mackenzie employs form, color, and surface to produce visually arresting, expressive, and useful pottery. MacKenzie was a living example of the ideology, inspiring young potters with his commitment to utility, simplicity, and raw beauty. The best museums in the world have collections of his work. Although he occasionally worked with porcelain over his career, most of his creations are made of stoneware.

23. Amélie Proulx

• Born: 30 December 1977
• Nationality: Canadian
• Notable artwork:
  • Du zénith au nadir, dimension, 201724.
  • Dactyles
  • Topiaires d’hiver, 2019

Amélie Proulx is a multi-talented artist who specializes in porcelain work. Her research areas are the perception of environmental occurrences and potential meaning alterations in language. Her art highlights how living things are constantly changing. She pushes the boundaries of her materials, defies preconceptions, and gives rise to freedom in her approach by referencing the codes and procedures of arts and crafts. The outcome manifests as expressive forms with a charming fragility.

The exceptional ability to strike a balance between reason and intuition belongs to Amélie Proulx. She is open to analyzing her work using mises en abyme or metonymic interplay. The artist’s remarkable intelligence and meticulous attention to detail are further demonstrated by the sound dimensions that accompany her dynamic and interactive creations. Amélie Proulx’s work is in a class by itself, transcending traditional ceramics thanks to her laborious and unceasing investigation.

24. Bouke de Vries

• Born: Utrecht, Netherlands
• Nationality: Dutch
• Most Known Arts:
  • Double Delft obelisks, 2020
  • Memory drug jar Petros, 2021
  • Buddhist memory vessel, 2019

Bouke de Vries is a Dutch ceramic artist living and working in London. His life experiences and artistic creations are similar in that they combine traditional techniques with new ones to create overt contemporary satire and social commentary. Reversing Ai Weiwei’s dramatic dropping of the Han dynasty urn to highlight the loss of history, de Vries reconstructs the broken pieces to provide a new perspective on the past.

To give broken ceramic vessels and figures, archaeological discoveries, sunken treasure, and scavenged beach shards new significance and worth, de Vries uses gold (kintsugi technique) to highlight the fractures of exploding ceramic stuff. Stories of mishaps, catastrophes, errors, and loss become fresh victories. With the conservator’s expertise and reversible yet amazingly durable adhesives, deVries manages to reconstruct Humpty Dumpty. De Vries’s shards come to life to provide a comedic punch or societal satire with his deft hand and sharp wit.

25. Kenneth Price

• Born: February 16, 1935, Los Angeles, California, US
• Died: February 24, 2012 (aged 77), Arroyo Hondo, New Mexico, US
• Nationality: American
• Notable artwork:
  • Tamed, 1984
  • Zaba, 2008
  • The Pair, 2009

During his five-decade career, Ken Price was a very creative artist who consistently altered the forms, textures, colors, and shapes of his sculptures. His fired clay abstract shapes are his most well-known creations. Usually, instead of being glazed, they are painstakingly painted using several coats of vivid acrylic paint, which are subsequently sanded to display the hues underneath.

In the 1960s and 1970s, he created small-scale pieces whose inventive and sometimes bizarre forms challenged the practicality of conventional ceramics. He abandoned his receptacle-like forms in the 1980s and 1990s and switched to acrylic paint instead of glazes. He frequently painted layers of acrylic paint over his bulbous clay forms before sanding them down to produce distinctive varied multicolor patterns. His final years saw him take up a much larger scale of work that speaks directly to the observer’s body. The smooth surfaces of his sculptures are lacquered with iridescent colors to amplify their alluring appeal further.

26. Beate Kuhn

• Born: 15 July 1927
• Died: 10 December 2015 (age 88years)
• Nationality: German
• Most famous artwork:
  • Löffelobjekt, 1975
  • Blackness, 1980
  • Yellow River, 2010

Beate Kuhn was well-known for her rhythmic groups of disassembled ceramic objects like spheres, cylinders, cones, and discs. She also used formal references to invertebrate animals, seeds, mushrooms, and succulents to convey exquisite and transcendent aspects of nature. Like the atonal music she loved, Kuhn’s sculptures were seductive and unsettling.

Kuhn began by creating ceramic kitchenware before advancing to creating sculpted vessels that show her critical investigation of the works of Paul Klee and Joan Miró. Still, potting’s visual language was essential. She started dissecting and reassembling wheel-thrown components. A sphere may have a garden of attenuated tubes spliced onto its top or discs with different diameters arranged dozens deep inside rectangular shells. She cut bowls, cups, ovoids, and spheres on both sides and arranged scores of almost identical pieces in organic compositions that evoked segmented corals, plants, or crabs. She experimented with positive and negative space by tucking convex forms inside concavities.

27. Katsuyo Aoki

• Born: 1972, Tokyo, Japan
• Nationality: Japanese
• Notable artwork:
  • Predictive Dream LVI, 2018
  • Loom, 2013
  • Trolldom, 2015

Katsuyo Aoki, the preeminent living porcelain artist, is primarily renowned for her elaborately designed and multifaceted ceramic skulls. Aoki, who works almost entirely with white porcelain, uses graceful, organic swirls that evoke the spirit of Rococo interior design to enhance her unquestionably gruesome subject matter. By forgoing straight lines in favor of these purely curved forms, Aoki hopes to convey her day’s significant paradoxes while inspiring her audience’s amazement and a sense of spiritual serenity.

The intricate features of Katsuyo Aoki’s labyrinthine sculptures are supported by their dazzling simplicity, hand-sculpted in bone-white porcelain. This material gives her paintings an unsettling delicacy because of their incredible complexity and matching formal intensity.

28. Sean Forest Roberts

• Born: 1990
• Nationality: American
• Notable artwork:
  • Faceted Pint B&W, 2019.
  • Galaxy Series Tumbler
  • Rainbow Drip Tumbler

Sean Forest Roberts is the proprietor of the prestigious porcelain ware manufacturer Forest Ceramic Company. His experimental studio approach, which resulted in the creation of his present line of patterned porcelain goods, is inspired by his experience in chemistry. Every pattern is created by hand using liquid clay and colored slip. Although general patterns can be replicated, each cup is unique due to this patterning process’s inherent unpredictability and delicate nature.

29. Linda Nguyen Lopez

• Born: 1981, Visalia, California.
• Nationality: American
• Notable artwork:
  • Shivering Dust Furry with Gold Rocks, 2020.
  • Windy, 2015.
  • Blue/Black Ombre Pants with Pink Cut-Outs, 2019.

Linda Nguyen’s abstract pieces imagine and articulate a broad spectrum of emotions ingrained in the commonplace objects surrounding us, exploring the poetic potential of the ordinary. Lopez’s “dust furries” and “mops,” which gather rocks and lint and draw our attention to the possible life of the commonplace objects that coexist peacefully with us, are both whimsical and reflective. She finds it difficult to accept that the things in our lives are lifeless. They can reveal a life and language of their own by considering the objects’ demands and rejecting our desires for them.

30. Keiko f*ckazawa

• Born: 1955. Niigata, Japan
• Nationality: Japanese
• Most notable artworks:
  • 48 Hours, 2021
  • Seven Days, 2022.
  • Scholar’s Rock II, 2009
  • Made in China, 2016.

Keiko f*ckazawa is a first-generation Japanese ceramicist based in the United States. She is renowned for creating whimsical yet tragic sculptures highlighting social and cultural themes and frequently featuring traditional Asian patterns. In subsequent years, f*ckazawa incorporated graffiti-like forms that alluded to contemporary themes like globalization, materialism, capitalism, and violence. Her practical, if impractical, interpretations of traditional forms allow her to express herself and reconcile her American surroundings with her ancestry.

From an outsider’s perspective, f*ckazawa has been a bicultural artist for more than 30 years. f*ckazawa’s recent stays in China have provided her with fresh viewpoints and cutting-edge venues for her conceptual art experiments.

31. Otto Heino

• Born: 20 April 1915, East Hampton, Connecticut, United States
• Died: 16 July 2009 (age 94 years), Ojai, California, United States
• Nationality: American.
• Most notable artworks:
  • Vase with Bird Heads, 1960-1970
  • Three Hole Weed Pot, 1985
  • Large Apple Ash Bottle, 1980-1990

Otto Heino created conventional thrown pot designs embellished with vibrant surface glazes alongside his wife, Vivika Heino. The Heino family collaborated and threw their own masterpieces in addition to working together for almost 50 years in a joint workshop. Otto tossed planters, tall vases, and large bottles on his own. He also created tiles that Vivika could decorate.

Sometimes, Otto Heino would create original artwork. These are sometimes larger in scale than Vivika’s and are made in the slab-built style of coiled sculptures or architectural structures. He carried on working, doing all of the throwing and glazing by himself, when Vivika passed away in 1995.

32. Georges Jeanclos

• Born: 9 April 1933 Paris, France
• Died: 30 March 1997, Paris, France
• Nationality: French
• Most notable artworks:
  • Disque (1988)
  • Arbre (1987)
  • La dormition (1985)

French sculptor and ceramicist Georges Jeanclos primarily used clay and terracotta but also worked with bronze. He is recognized for his sculptures of people covered in thin clay layers, some of which have Hebrew characters. The thin sheets of clay that cover and form the sculptures have been subjected to extreme physical strain and intensive beating. Molds are frequently used in the creation of human forms. His sculptures depict or incorporate Jewish motifs, such as urns, meditation positions (“Kamamuras”), references to the medieval rabbi Rashi, and Hebrew letters from the mournful Kaddish on the blankets of sleepers.

33. Syd Carpenter

• Born: 1953, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
• Nationality: American
• Notable artwork:
  • Pearl Fryar, 2014.
  • Sara Reynolds, 2014.
  • Ella Mae Edwards, 2009.

Syd Carpenter is a retired studio art professor and African American artist whose ceramic and sculpture pieces delve into African-American gardening and farming. She starts her work by picturing objects and shapes in connection to space. Carpenter replicates details from her observations on a smaller scale in her pieces, such as the rounded shapes of an old washing machine, a wheel, a section of fence, and a root. She uses assembly in her pieces, particularly in the more abstract ones. To broaden the frame of reference, various discovered things are included in the clay creations. She addresses an experience rather than crafting a straight-line story; she is not interested in imitating a face or a location.

Syd Carpenter finds inspiration in the physical and emotional solace that gardening affords, regardless of whether it serves a useful purpose like cultivating food or allows individuals to manifest their artistic inclinations through the utilization of ornamental garden elements such as color, texture, and light. Her enormous sculptures demand to be put on show outside, and she hopes they will eventually grow into gardens that serve as habitats for lichen and other organic stuff.

34. Patti Warashina

• Born: 1940, Spokane, Washington.
• Nationality: American
• Notable artwork:
  • Flashcat ’22-D, 2021
  • Conversation with Twine, 2009
  • Whisper, 2011
  • ’20-C Bird Covered Jar, 2020

American artist Patti Warashina is well-known for her inventive ceramic sculptures. Frequently employing porcelain to build her sculptures, Warashina produces figurative and narrative art. She often uses comedy in her art, which she describes as “clay figures placed in imagined environments that show her subversive thinking.” Her medium is low-fire polychrome ceramics, with vibrant, lively colors and surface decorations. She investigates issues related to politics, society, the human condition, feminism, and automobile culture through sculpture.

When Warashina was an art student at the University of Washington in the 1960s, she saw that the ceramics workshop had a somewhat macho attitude and that women were excluded from technical talks about running the kiln. She started making several humorous figurative pieces that poked fun at the gender gap in the industry.

35. Kate Malone

• Born: 29 January 1959, London, United Kingdom
• Nationality: British
• Notable artwork:
  • CINDERELLA’S CARRIAGE TEAPOT 1996
  • STARFISH IN THE BELLY OF THE SEA URCHIN 1989
  • A Monumental Atomic Magma Vase, 2018
  • Magma Flower Brick, 2018

Kate Malone is renowned for her huge sculpture-like vases and vibrant, rich glazes. Malone’s designs, which feature gourds, pumpkins, pineapples, and other natural forms, honor fecundity. She uses T material clay, which is more frequently connected to industrial ceramics; it is white and gives her glazes a vibrant appearance. She has several primary forms that start as a coiled piece and are later “dressed, like people wearing different coats” by adding surface modeling and press molds.

Malone’s vivid and bright color scheme gives her paintings a striking visual presence. Large brushes are used to paint the exterior, and a slip trailer is used to apply and swill the interior glazes. The kiln’s fluctuating temperatures lead the crystals to grow in a manner that is similar to how they do naturally, holding them suspended in the glaze. Although crystalline glazes are renowned for being challenging to work with, they have an alluring, unpredictable beauty that makes opening the kiln seem “like unwrapping a present.”

Malone draws a lot of inspiration for his paintings from far-off places, natural growth patterns, ripeness, and geometry. Her art conveys a “feel good factor” by wrapping her figures with abundant sculptural elements, vibes, rant hues, and luxurious crystalline glazes.

36. John Glick

• Born: John Parker Glick, July 1, 1938. Detroit, Michigan, U.S.
• Died: April 6, 2017 (aged 78)
• Nationality: American
• Notable artwork:
  • Plate, 2003
  • Two-Part Standing Landscape, 1992.
  • Drinking Horn, 1968.

John Glick’s most well-known creations were his unique tableware designs, which he developed in close cooperation with his clients and assistants. These designs were muted in the Japanese style of pottery but adorned with abstract shapes and patterns and vibrant multi-layered glazes. His involvement in ceramics inspired him to write multiple articles about the art form. Towards the end of his career, Glick started creating “landscape-oriented” wall panels in addition to ceramics. Often referred to as “the people’s potter,” his contributions to pottery and art make him most notable.

37. Viola Frey

• Born: 15 August 1933, Lodi, California, United States
• Died: 26 July 2004 (age 70 years), Oakland, California, United States
• Nationality: American.
• Notable artwork:
  • Crocker Series III, 1979
  • World Civilization Bench, 2003
  • Yellow Hand and Orange Horse, 1983

Viola Frey was an emeritus professor at California College of the Arts and an American artist who created sculptures, paintings, and drawings. Her larger-than-life, vibrantly glazed clay sculptures of men and women pushed the bounds of traditional ceramic sculpture and made her a household name in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she also worked.

Viola Frey saw early on the difference between fine arts and crafts. Because of this, Viola Frey could effortlessly transition between two- and three-dimensional artworks. She also frequently studied various topics at once, which helped develop her visual language. Among many other things, her iconography comprised hands, suited men, and cast miniatures. She constructed stories on plates and combined molded items from her collection of figurines to make bricolage sculptures that took on new significance. She evoked emotion with light, color, and scale in her works.

38. Victor Spinski

• Born: 10 October 1940, Poland
• Died: 21 January 2013 (age 72 years), Newark, Delaware, United States
• Nationality: American

Victor Spinski is well-known for his sculptures of still-life compositions of commonplace items, such as dishes in the sink, tools, paint cans, and paper cups in cardboard boxes. Several assemblages include items that convincingly appear to be made of materials other than ceramic.

Along with other ceramic artists such as Richard Shaw, David Furman, Sylvia Hyman, Marilyn Levine, and Raymon Elozua, Spinski contributed to developing pottery’s trompe l’oeil (French for “fool the eye”) movement. The ancient Greeks were the first to attempt to trick the audience into believing they were looking at three-dimensional objects through paintings. Spinski started using slip-cast ceramic to create sculptures depicting still lifes. Spinski like most of his contemporaries, avoided using paint in favor of china paint, glazes, and lusters made of porcelain, which are far more challenging to handle but also more durable.

39. Robert Arneson

• Born: September 4, 1930. Benicia, California, U.S.
• Died: November 2, 1992 (aged 62)
• Nationality: American
• Notable artwork:
  • Doyen, 1972.
  • Balderdash-dash, 1978
  • Poised to Infinity, 1991

Robert Arneson spent almost thirty years as a ceramics professor at the University of California, Davis Art Department. Arneson and several other Californian artists started creating non-functional sculptures that made provocative statements at the beginning of the 1960s, abandoning the custom of producing functional clay pieces. Arneson is regarded as the founder of the ceramic Funk movement, which gave rise to the new movement known as Funk Art.

Arneson, who ceramicist Peter Voulkos influenced, invented a novel approach to usefulness by making surrealist busts, phallic teapots and telephones, and non-functional pots and pans. Robert Arneson created drawings and ceramic sculptures using everyday materials like soda bottles, typewriters, and toilets. Numerous self-portraits in his body of work have been referred to as an “autobiography in clay.”

40. Adelaide Alsop Robineau

• Born: 9 April 1865, Middletown, Connecticut, United States
• Died: 1929 (age 64 years), Syracuse, New York, United States
• Nationality: American
• Notable artwork:
  • Scarab Vase, 1910
  • Vase with moose, c. 1907-08
  • Bowl, 1924

English china painter and potter Adelaide Alsop Robineau was regarded as one of the preeminent ceramists of her era in American art pottery. Robineau and her husband started publishing Keramic Studio in 1899, a periodical for ceramic artists and potters that ran until 1919. She offered her painted china, watercolors, and ceramics for sale, and she also taught pottery and painting at her Four Winds Pottery School.

Around 1901, Robineau started taking her ceramics seriously and gained recognition as a china painter. She started experimenting with different methods after growing to believe that there were better courses of action than painting over the glaze, which was then a popular technique. Her primary medium was porcelain, and she experimented with American clays to produce authentic high-fire porcelain.

Along with experimenting with various forms, embellishments, and glazes, Robineau often used multicolored, iridescent, and opalescent glazes. Japonisme and Art Nouveau influence her use of stylized animal and botanical elements in her mature work. She did every step of the process herself, from making the pots to incising and painting them, during a period when many renowned Chinese artists used blanks created by others. She used crochet needles and dental instruments to achieve the required effect on several of her works because the detail work was so finely detailed.

41. Ann Van Hoey

• Born: 1956
• Nationality: American
• Notable artwork:
  • Red Object, 2021
  • Yellow Origami Vessel, 2015
  • Bronstijd, 2016

Ann Van Hoey begins with fundamental spatial forms. Inspired by the Japanese art of origami and mesmerized by the geometric patterns found in Zen gardens of stones, she invented the method for folding thin clay sheets.

She even cuts to recompose. By specifying the guiding outlines of the reshaped hemisphere according to the geometric placement of the incisions, the flawless simplicity of the hemisphere is preserved. This implies an increasing conflict between the reorganized entity and how space is perceived, as the raw earth’s crude aesthetics coexist with its delicate texture. In addition, even though the cuts are straight, they are bent and curved to match the bowl’s convexity.

Consequently, the power of the fundamental material—clay—radiates from an intentionally minimalistic display of purity, shape, simplicity, sobriety, efficiency, and line clarity—a geometric and mathematical relentlessness model.

Ann Van Hoey combines traditional materiality with industrial innovation for her “Earthenware Ferrari” series pieces, which blend the age-old technique of making earthenware vessels with an unexpected Ferrari car paint finish. This combination ultimately invites contemplation on how to strike a balance between capitalistic consumerism and skill.

42. Pablo Picasso

• Born: 25 October 1881 Málaga, Kingdom of Spain
• Died: 8 April 1973 (aged 91), Mougins, France
• Notable artwork:
  • Tête de chèvre de profil, 1957
  • Trois poissons sur fond gris, 1957
  • Vallauris, 1956

Pablo Picasso was a Spanish artist who lived most of his adult life in France. He was also a printmaker, theater designer, sculptor, and ceramicist. Pablo Picasso’s experimentation with ceramics is a noteworthy example of his creative adaptability and boundary-pushing imagination. Picasso, mostly known for his paintings and sculptures, expanded the scope of his already innovative career by experimenting with ceramics. He focused on the medium in the late 1940s, working with expert potters in the South of France. An astonishing collection of ceramic works surfaced that captured Picasso’s unique aesthetic and inventive spirit.

Between 1947 and 1971, Pablo Picasso created 633 distinct ceramic versions; these first creations gave rise to several variations and one-of-a-kind pieces. He started making straightforward, functional items like plates and bowls. Still, as time passed, he created increasingly intricate designs, such as pitchers and vases, with handles that were occasionally fashioned to resemble the facial features or anatomical traits of the animals he painted.

Picasso combined modernism with tradition in his ceramic creations, drawing inspiration from new art movements and antiquated pottery methods. The pieces created from this singular fusion are at once classic and audaciously avant-garde. Picasso’s ceramics push the limits of what clay can do, from attractive plates with happy images to expertly formed vases that appear to defy gravity.

These ceramic pieces also provide insight into Picasso’s personal life and philosophy. They reveal his love of the Mediterranean way of life, reflected in the vivid color scheme and lively images he used. The ceramics also demonstrate his ability to reinvent himself, showing how he can work with different materials and make a lasting impression.

Picasso experimented with various ceramic techniques, including painting, molding clay, and etching its surface. After much investigation, he decided to use two primary production techniques. The first involved meticulously recreating an original thing by hand, paying particular attention to its shape and embellishment. The artwork produced using this technique bears the label “Empreinte Originale de Picasso.” The second approach entails the artist making original images in dry clay molds and then transferring the pattern onto fresh clay.

43. Joan Miró

• Born: 20 April 1893, Barcelona, Spain
• Died: 25 December 1983 (age 90years), Palma, Spain
• Notable artwork:
  • Pumpkin, 1956
  • Woman, 1949

Johan Miro crafted hundreds of ceramic works throughout his lifetime, including an entire series of plates, vessels, and pebbles, among other items. As befitted an artist who detested mass production, each was genuinely unique. Even though many people helped Joan Miro in his workshop, he was always more interested in their designs than the technical execution, occasionally delegating that task to others. He had a solid emotional bond with the medium of ceramics. He considered it a magical art in which incredible objects are created by combining clay, flame, ash, and smoke.

Josep Llorens Artigas, the elder, and Miró’s partnerships got off to a rough start. Artigas had by then removed any ornamentation from his creations. It was agreed upon that Miro would decorate the ceramic pieces like he did his paintings using his artistic flair. Throughout their partnership, they would employ a variety of kilns, including wooden and charcoal models. They all produced quite different outcomes. Sometimes, they would choose not to use glazes to give the outside a rougher, more organic look. Their art was more varied since they occasionally moved studios or used different kilns.

Because of the unpredictability of this material, Joan Miro would even destroy some of his ceramic sculptures that he thought had too precise and consistent dimensions. It was the inconsistency that he thought better reflected a natural look.

44. Sequoia Miller

• Born: 1970, Manhattan, New York, United States
• Nationality: American
• Notable artwork:
  • Vase, 1985
  • Yellow faceted box, 2009
  • Tall altered box, 2010

Sequoia Miller is a studio potter, curator, and historian. Before pursuing curatorial and academic work, he worked as a full-time studio potter in the Pacific Northwest. Usually created via wheel throwing and altering, his pots have an architectural quality while still being functional for everyday use in the home.

Sequoia Miller created various practical designs from stoneware that were either slab-made, thrown, or drastically altered. He utilized only a few colors, usually dark green and black, with contrast created by unglazed portions. While some pieces were burnt in a wood kiln, most were fired in a gas kiln. Miller approached his job with a keen sense of intellectual curiosity.

45. Shozo Michikawa

• Born: 1953, Japan
• Nationality: Japanese
• Notable artwork:
  • Kohiki (Sculptural Form), 2022
  • Natural ash Sculptural Form 4, 2019
  • Natural Ash Bowl, 2007

It is evident from looking at his work that Michikawa’s creative independence and approach were greatly inspired by experiencing and breathing the power of nature while growing up. His artworks evoke the sensation of natural phenomena rather than being manufactured with intention, whether displayed in the white space of an international museum or perched on a shelf in a private dining room. Michikawa has honed a distinct style in both sculpture and ceramics. He never considers the exterior of a piece; instead, he builds from the negative space outward.

The distinctive configurations of Shozo Michikawa’s works are made by utilizing the velocity and centrifugal force of the potter’s wheel and expanding it from its center with a wooden stick. The colors are produced in the high-firing kiln, where naturally occurring earthy tones frequently coalesce or melt when substances like silver are introduced via the tanka or carbonization process in reduction firing.

Shozo Michikawa skillfully merges contemporary forms with traditional ceramic heritage techniques, resulting in works that frequently exhibit a robust sculptural quality while maintaining a practical purpose.

Every piece in the ‘Sculptural Form’ series exudes a distinct and noteworthy presence. Their frequently erect posture implies the potential for perpetual rotation. The horizontal incisions, performed before the clay is pressed onto the wheel, cause divisions in the sculpture and, analogous to musical notation, impart cadence to the structure while allowing for compositional and motion variations.

46. Anna Sew Hoy

• Born: 1976, Auckland, New Zealand
• Nationality: American
• Notable artwork:
  • Veiled Orb, 2019
  • Naked, If I Want To, 2019
  • Embodied Head III, 2016

Anna Sew Hoy connects with our surroundings through sculpture, ceramics, public art, and performance, demonstrating the power of the transient and handmade. Her work has been at the vanguard of contemporary art’s clay resurgence. It is associated with a critical reevaluation of the link between craft and art, especially in light of the hierarchical nature of both disciplines due to their associations with gender and class.

Sew Hoy frequently adds textiles and garments on stoneware to create sculptures with a living, breathing quality. Easily recognizable apparel items like jeans are commonly paired with everyday household items. If these identifiable aspects of human existence give the artist’s sculptures a certain familiarity, using these materials to create round, gaping skulls, tentacle-like limbs, and other vaguely anatomical forms gives her work a very otherworldly feel. The artist frequently incorporates gaping holes or peeling textural layers into his ceramic pieces, which engage with psychological and metaphysical issues by bringing attention to the tension between the internal and outer.

47. Shary Boyle

• Born: 26 May 1972, Toronto, Canada
• Nationality: Canadian
• Notable artwork:
  • Red Shoes, Fake News, 2020
  • Inverted Fetish, 2017
  • Rage, 2022

Shary Boyle is a highly skilled and inventive artist whose work is sparked by mentoring and teamwork. Boyle’s work considers the historical history of figurines, outdated technologies, animist mythologies, and folk art forms to produce a language that is both distinctively her own and symbolic and politically charged. Her art delves into gender, sexuality, identity, power, and class, employing skilful craftsmanship to evoke strong emotional and mental responses. She is especially well-known for her porcelain sculpting investigations of the figure.

Using commercial molds and traditional porcelain lace techniques, Boyle created sculptures for his early porcelain ‘figurine’ series (2002-2006), which explored the historical connection between adornment and over-decoration regarding women and gender issues. The resurgence of porcelain and ceramics as a contemporary art medium in Toronto during the early 2000s is attributed to her early experiments with the material and her subversion of female hobby crafts from kitsch to contemporary art. This subversion of the material challenged the hierarchy between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art.

48. Malcolm Mobutu Smith

• Born: 28 December 1969
• Nationality: American
• Notable artwork:
  • Li’l Tuffy Adrift in a Sea of Peril, 2019
  • Currentbodies, 2013
  • Venus of Earth, 2023

The works of Malcolm Mobutu Smith are influenced by modifications that alternate between graphic flatness and volumetric forms. The intersections of comic books, fun organic abstraction, and graffiti art serve as inspiration for the vessels. His ceramic shapes typically comprise hand-built and wheel-thrown parts, normally displayed as abstract representations of vases, bottles, and cups. Malcolm combines his love of jazz and hip-hop with these forms in this creative process to create spaces that encourage creativity and the unexpected. Malcolm’s work is based on wheel-thrown and hand-built forms, most typically portrayed as abstractions of cups, bottles, and vases. His improvisational process to guide his work combines the graphic with form in space.

49. Joan Gardy Artigas

• Born: 18 June 1938, Spain
• Nationality: Spanish
• Notable artwork:
  • Composición, 1974
  • La bague au doigt, 1973
  • La Porte Bleue, 1973.

Joan Gardy Artigas is a Catalan artist and ceramicist who worked closely with Joan Miró. Josep Llorens Artigas, his father, collaborated closely with Pablo Picasso and Miró. Because of his father’s connection to the well-known artist, Artigas could work with Miró when he was still in his teenage years. In 1963, he made his stage debut alone at the Sala Gaspar. From then on, he started working as a sculptor and experimenting with different methods. He first modeled in clay and epoxy resin before moving on to try out a variety of shapes and materials. He thus set out on a new route to build his universe of feminine forms, adding the fish, creatures, and monsters along with organic lines, all of which have contributed to developing his distinct style.

50. Jeanne Verdoux

• Born: 1966
• Nationality: French
• Notable artwork:
  • Spider cup, 2020
  • La tete dans le sable, ceramics and glaze, 14x8x9 in., 2020
  • La Fuite, Glazed ceramic, 2019.

Jeanne Verdoux is a mixed-media visual artist specializing in prints, ceramics, and drawing. Verdoux conveys the malleability, elasticity, and diversity of what it means to be a woman by stretching and pushing the concept of a “vessel,” exploring the full range of its meanings as not simply a container but an object that receives. The end products combine beauty, practicality, and fantasy ideas in wacky, bizarre, twisted forms. The artist’s bodily experiences are a significant inspiration for the ceramics. She also finds animal-shaped jars and figurines of ancient Greek, Roman, and Persian ceramics fascinating.