Welcome - This is a Social Enterprise Business It aims to help potters and ceramic artists to become better known, to sell their work, to fill their courses and to provide a window into this fantastic world of 3D art!

New Members
Ceramics by Josie Warshaw at Studiopottery.co.ukJosie Warshaw
Ceramics by Anna Noel at Studiopottery.co.ukAnna Noel

Work for Sale
Ceramics by Kochevet Bendavid at Studiopottery.co.uk

Kochevet Bendavid

Ceramics by John Calver at Studiopottery.co.uk

John Calver

Upcoming events
James Oughtibridge - Ebb and Flow at Contemporary Ceramics Centre 14th June to 7th July, 2018
Eddie Curtis at Loveclay 26th May to 15th June, 2018 Solo Showcase at Valentine Clays
Peter Hayes at Thrown 8th - 27th June 2018 New work from Peter Hayes - this master of clay!
Potfest Scotland - 22nd year at Scone Palace, Scotland 8th - 10th June 2018 Marquee event at Scone Palace, Perth with many well known and some yet to be well known potters showing.

Recently added Courses

Regular Pottery Courses by Suleyman Saba - 29th January to 31st December, 2018
Students will learn about preparing clay and different techniques of ceramics from pinch pots and coiled pottery, to slab building and throwing. Students are also guided on aspects of decoration and glazing. 
Lindy Barletta weekday Courses in East Sheen - 1st January to 31st December, 2018
Studio Pottery Making techniques: A terms course covers a project in each - pinching, coiling, slab building and throwing.

Archive for May, 2012

Telesales Creep! (Beware of Aggressive Sales Pressure)

Two or three members have alerted me to a quite aggressive telesales person, who seems to use another members name as a credential and is then trying to sell website space through google – or something similar. This seems to be something members and others should be aware of and as i have said before, i think…… “If you get an uninvited caller trying to sell you something, the safest course is to just close the call or if it’s an email delete it to junk mail without opening any attachments!

A message i received about this current scam/direct selling was on the lines of

“I thought I would let you know of a call I received today from a pushy guy wanting, I think, to sell website space thro’ Google.

I told him I wasn’t interested several times and finally hung up. Shortly after that (another maker) called me that she had had the guy on the line using my name (which I really resent) as well as (another makers). I assured her I had not recommended anything like this as I totally distrust this form of selling and deeply resent my name being used like this. I think this maybe another scam and was wandering if you had had any one else with the same problem.”

These callers can be very plausible and if they are using someone’s name that you know, try to gain underserved credibility.  Please, please JUST HANG UP! If you didn’t request the contact you don’t want whatever is being sold – even if you think you might want it – DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH and then call someone who you have chosen – NOT someone WHO HAS CHOSEN YOU!!!!

I hope this reminder may help you all to be on guard….. Stephen

TICKET OFFER FOR NEW DESIGNERS 2012

READER TICKET OFFER FOR NEW DESIGNERS 2012

Welcome to New Designers

Part 1: Wednesday 27 – Saturday 30 June 2012

Part 2: Wednesday 4 – Saturday 7 July 2012

Save over 25% with the special price tickets for New Designers – Introducing exceptional graduate design talent for over 25 years. The class of 2012 are a creative force, beckoning attention at the Business Design Centre in this exciting show, presented across two weeks. Applied arts, fashion accessories, ceramics, glass and jewellery are ready to purchase. Furniture, products, architecture and visual communications are available to commission.  With its fresh voices and new directions New Designers is a must-see event for everyone in touch with contemporary design. Be the first one to spot the emerging stars before they become design icons.

Readers of Studio Pottery pay just £8.50* by booking in advance instead of £14 on the door. To take advantage of this special offer please quote ND119 when booking at www.newdesigners.com or call 08448 480140 (from 9 May)

*£1.50 booking fee applies per ticket purchased in advance

Danlami Aliyu – born about 1952; died 26 April 2012

Danlami Aliyu – born about 1952; died 26 April 2012
After Ladi Kwali, Danlami was the best modern potter in Nigeria. He learned at the Pottery Training Centre set up by Michael Cardew in Abuja. He was good, so I asked Michael if he would take him on at Wenford. He did. He thought Danlami was outstanding and arranged for the pots he made there to have a show at the commonwealth Institute. It was well reviewed in Crafts. After Wenford Danlami went to Farnham to learn about kiln-building. In the thesis he wrote at the end of his course he compared the pottery made at the Training Centre with the pots his mother used to buy locally.
This thesis was published whole in Pottery Quarterly. Out of respect for Michael he gave it to him in person.
On the train to Cornwall, Michael’s wife Mariel read it and was so moved by it that tears ran down her cheeks, charmed by his simple way of writing and the Africanisms which made it so vivid. Michael read it and was silent.
A comment made by Danlami in a spirit of humility, not of criticism devastated him. “ …..too complicated for us….”, the Training Centre and the fifteen happiest years of his life that he had spent setting it up, were a failure. “Too complicated”, those two words haunted me too and fundamentally changed the way I taught when I returned to Nigeria.
By this time, fifteen years after Cardew left, the Abuja training centre was in decline. After a further 6 years Danlami, having been overseas  and now understanding its significance, together Umaru his brother and myself decided to do something about it. We built a new pottery at Maraba, modelled on Abuja, hoping to recapture the extraordinary spirit it had while Michael was there. It was successful, Danlami stayed longer than I did and gave it a sound basis which enabled it to expand and last 20 years after he left.
To this day there are more good throwers in Maraba than in the rest of Nigeria.
The other things he did there would be of little interest here, except his regiment as he called them…..fifteen children! To spend a day in his compound was a pleasure, the younger ones were beguiling and so well behaved with inquisitive little faces, the adolescents graceful and friendly.
Danlami is remembered here (in the UK) as a student. He was young and handsome, a joker, popular with everybody. In Minna, as news of his death spread, crowds filled his compound, people from all walks of life from top civil servants (the Governor sent a representative) to poor potters who came from Maraba two hundred miles away.
He was very well liked and it was a great tribute, but how sad he has gone, he was only 59. What a pity so little of his brush decoration has been seen (and valued). He saw Cardew work, but his is different. It is so skillful that it is surprising it shows no trace of showmanship, instead it is simple, not the simplicity achieved by minimalism, but by a simplicity of spirit which sings as pure and as natural as a bird’s song.
Cardew thought him outstanding and so he was.
Michael O’Brien

Ceramics and Sculpture: Different Disciplines and Shared Concerns. 5 July 2012

Registration is now open for the conference Ceramics and Sculpture: Different Disciplines and Shared Concerns taking place on 5 July 2012 in Cardiff at Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales. More info contact: adutton@cardiffmet.ac.uk Book from website shown below.

About the Conference:
Relationships between ceramics and sculpture are a focus for research at Cardiff School of Art and Design. This research has demonstrated that the interests of ceramicists and sculptors in Britain have either overlapped or come into particularly sharp focus at certain periods.
The Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, has in the last few years awarded research fellowships to explore such relationships. Both ceramics and sculpture now have to make a case for their survival as discrete disciplines within higher education and increasingly categories are blurred.
Against this background the conference seeks to illuminate shared concerns by examining points of formal, conceptual, theoretical and material convergences between the two disciplines, while also addressing key points of difference.
Speakers:
Paper 1:  Michael Hose (Cardiff Metropolitan University) ‘What difference can a description make?’
Paper 2:  Conor Wilson
‘You can use clay, but you can’t do ceramics’: Some thoughts about why Ceramics isn’t Sculpture, based on the thinking of Eduardo Chillida and Robert Morris’
Paper 3:  Dr Isabel Hufschmidt (Mirko Mayer Gallery, Cologne, Germany) ‘The Edition of Sculpture in England:  A French spirit of commerce, English manufactories and the New Sculpture’
Paper 4:  Michael Tooby (independent researcher and curator) ‘The way in which a major museum’s collecting activity can transgress traditional taxonomies in a creative and rich manner’
Paper 5:  Alun Graves (Curator, Ceramics & Glass Collection, V&A) ‘Hans Coper: Sculpture in Architecture’
Paper 6:  Professor Stephen Dixon (Manchester Metropolitan University) ‘Why Clay?’
Keynote speaker:  Dr Jon Wood (Henry Moore Institute, Leeds) ‘Manual Thinking’
Panel - Q & A and discussion with Bonnie Kemske (editor of Ceramic Review), David Jones (University of Wolverhampton)