In pottery, a potter's wheel is a machine used in the shaping of clay into round ceramic ware. The wheel may also be used during the process of trimming excess clay from leather-hard dried ware that is stiff but malleable, and for applying incised decoration or rings of colour. Use of the potter's wheel became widespread throughout the Old World but was unknown in the Pre-Columbian New World, where pottery was handmade by methods that included coiling and beating.
Peter Voulkos was an American artist of Greek descent. He is known for his abstract expressionist ceramic sculptures, which crossed the traditional divide between ceramic crafts and fine art. He established the ceramics department at the Los Angeles County Art Institute and at UC Berkeley.
Studio pottery is pottery made by professional and amateur artists or artisans working alone or in small groups, making unique items or short runs. Typically, all stages of manufacture are carried out by the artists themselves. Studio pottery includes functional wares such as tableware and cookware, and non-functional wares such as sculpture, with vases and bowls covering the middle ground, often being used only for display. Studio potters can be referred to as ceramic artists, ceramists, ceramicists or as an artist who uses clay as a medium.
Gwyn Hanssen Pigott OAM (1935–2013) was an Australian ceramic artist. She was recognized as one of Australia’s most significant contemporary artists. By the time she died she was regarded as "one of the world's greatest contemporary potters". She worked in Australia, England, Europe, the US, New Zealand, Japan and Korea. In a career spanning nearly 60 years, influences from her apprenticeships to English potters were still apparent in her later work. But in the 1980s she turned away from production pottery to making porcelain still-life groups largely influenced by the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi.
Julia Galloway is a Montana-based studio potter and professor of ceramics at the University of Montana-Missoula.
Lisa Hammond is a British studio potter.
Frances Maude Senska was an art professor and artist specializing in ceramics who taught at Montana State University – Bozeman from 1946 to 1973. She was known as the "grandmother of ceramics in Montana". During her career, she trained a number of now internationally known ceramic artists.
Joyce Scott FRSASA 'is an Australian artist working in drawing, oil painting and ceramics.' 'She has held ten independent exhibitions, is represented internationally and has received five awards.' 'Scott, née Mottershead, was born in Poynton, Cheshire, England in 1938 and migrated with her family to Adelaide, South Australia in 1951.'
John Parker is a New Zealand ceramicist and theatre designer.
Heather Mae Erickson is an artist, a craftsperson, and a designer. Erickson earned her BFA at The University of the Arts, majoring in crafts specializing in ceramics with a concentration in art education. Continuing her studies at Cranbrook Academy of Art, she earned an MFA in ceramic art.
Carol Sauvion is an American crafts scholar and patron, and the executive Producer and director of the PBS documentary series Craft in America.
Ceramic art is art made from ceramic materials, including clay. It may take varied forms, including artistic pottery, including tableware, tiles, figurines and other sculpture. As one of the plastic arts, ceramic art is a visual art. While some ceramics are considered fine art, such as pottery or sculpture, most are considered to be decorative, industrial or applied art objects. Ceramic art can be created by one person or by a group, in a pottery or a ceramic factory with a group designing and manufacturing the artware.
Ian Broun Sprague (1920–1994) was an Australian twentieth-century studio potter, ceramic sculptor and graphic artist. Delayed by the Second World War and a false start in architecture, he spent (broadly) his forties adapting Australian domestic pottery to a Japanese aesthetic of contemplative use; his fifties as a sculptor in two- and three-dimensional pottery; his sixties and seventies making landscape works on paper.
Kurt Weiser is an American ceramicist and professor. His work—explorations of the relationship between man and nature through narratives rendered in vivid color—are described as "Eden-like." His work has often taken the form of teapots, vases, and cups, though he has recently begun crafting globes as well. Weiser is currently the Regents Professor at Arizona State University's School of Art.
Chris Gustin is an American ceramicist. Gustin models his work on the human form, which is shown through the shape, color, and size of the pieces.
Karl Martz was an American studio potter, ceramic artist, and teacher whose work achieved national and international recognition.
Nan Bangs McKinnell (1913–2012) was an American ceramicist and educator. Nan was a founding member of the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts, a member of the American Craft Council College of Fellows, along with receiving several awards for her work. James "Jim" McKinnell (1919–2005), her spouse, was also a ceramicist and they made some collaborative work.
Lisa Kay Orr is an American potter and a teacher of ceramics. Orr has work in both public and private collections, and shows her work nationally as well as internationally. Orr's work can be seen in the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco and in Korea in the collection of the WOCEF.
Jennifer Elizabeth Lee is a Scottish ceramic artist with an international reputation. Lee's distinctive pots are hand built using traditional pinch and coil methods. She has developed a method of colouring the pots by mixing metallic oxides into the clay before making. Her work is held in over forty museums and public collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. In 2018 Lee won the Loewe Craft Prize, an award initiated by Jonathan Anderson in 2017. The prize was presented to her at an awards ceremony at The Design Museum in London.
Sandy Brown is a British ceramics artist who is nationally and internationally known for her works, which range from smaller ceramics to huge public sculptures. Brown is a Fellow of the Craft Potters Association.
Octagonal Bird Plate, 2015, Earthenware, 7.5" x 7.5"
Racoon Jar, Porcelain, 7" x 5" x 5"
