Category Archives: Review

10 Mar 12

Innovative Techniques: intriguing or perpexing?

Ceramic Art: Innovative Techniques is a collection of articles that includes work and techniques that are unrelated to each other, and while some will inspire, others may just leave you asking “why?”  Projects range from squared casseroles (the least “artistic” pieces in the book) to pots that are created by printing them in a three-dimensional [...]
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31 Jan 12

Breaking the Mould: New Approaches to Ceramics

This big fat book by Rob Barnard, Natasha Daintry and Clare Twomey, contains many inviting colour photos of mostly sculptural ceramic pieces. The book opens with three dense academic essays, one on the place of the vessel in contemporary ceramics, one on the tension between the desire by contemporary ceramic artists to have their work [...]
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16 Nov 11

Sandi Piernatozzi wants us to try something different

In the DVD set What If? Explorations with Texture and Soft Slabs, Sandi Piernatozzi’s demonstrates how working with soft slabs can open up infinite possibilities in both shape and texture. As beginners we were taught to make a cylinder by forming  a slab around a vertical form (and don’t forget to cover the form with [...]
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16 Nov 11

Screen Printing on Clay

In Screen Printing on Clay, Paul Andrew Wandless starts at the beginning by showing us, step-by-step, how to make a small silkscreen out of a picture frame. He then goes on to show how to using drawing fluid and screen block (similar to wax resist technique) to apply images to the screen. He also creates [...]
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23 Sep 11

Mitch Lyons on Cylinders and Coloured Clay

Mitch Lyons’ DVD, Handbuilding with Mitch Lyons, can be enjoyed on many levels, from his “broomstick” technique for making weird and wonderful cylinders and his use of textures and coloured slips and clays for decoration, to his efficient methods and workspace and even the way that the video was produced. To make his cylinders, Lyons [...]
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23 Sep 11

Wheel Throwing with Nan Rothwell, worth the price?

Wheel Throwing with Nan Rothwell consists of a series of project-based instructional sessions that starts with cylinders and bowls and moves on to more specialized work such as a berry bowl, a sushi set, a two-piece pitcher, an oval utensil holder and a lamp base. Rothwell also shows some creative ways to use a wiggle [...]
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23 Sep 11

Studio Ceramics, Advanced Techniques

This volume from the Ceramic Arts Handbook Series (edited by Anderson Turner) feels like a collection of everything that couldn’t be included in any of the other handbooks, and thus the articles are not united by any one theme. However, intermediate potters should be able to find, among the 29 articles inside Studio Ceramics, at [...]
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2 May 11

Ceramic Projects: Forming Techniques, reviewed

If you’re an intermediate potter who is looking for ways to expand your repertoire or a pottery teacher who needs to satisfy more experienced students, the 26 projects in Ceramic Projects, Forming Techniques will keep you busy. Included are an extruded lotion dispenser, a citrus juicer, lanterns and lights, several innovative teapots, three-piece pots, and [...]
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11 Jan 11

33 ways to play with the surface of clay

Surface Decoration: Finishing Techniques, another in the Ceramic Arts Handbook Series, could be subtitled “thirty-three ways to play with the surface of clay” because it consists of thirty-three essays that describe a wide range of techniques, from simply impressing and incising texure into leatherhard clay using just about anything you can think of, to more [...]
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5 Jan 11

Hot & Smokey

Raku, Pit & Barrel: Firing Techniques is a collection of twenty-eight articles from Ceramics Monthly and Pottery Making Today that will both inform and inspire anyone who is interested in alternative firing methods. Most of the articles cover raku, from its earliest use in the West to modern innovations such as using underglazes and stains [...]
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