Incollect Magazine - Issue 3

2022 Incollect Magazine 97 sculptural field, also a lot of ceramics artists are painters, with the glazes akin to abstract paintings. Then there is the history of centuries of people taking the earth and turning it into something. Ceramics is a near inexhaustible form of art, you never get done with the genre.” Blake is excited about the way new technology is pushing the medium. One of his artists, Stephanie Ann Bachiero, has experimented with scale, scaling up 10–15-inch ceramic pieces into 4–6 foot sculptures in collaboration with an industrial-military fabricator using 3-D animation and resin casting, and the technology exists to scale ceramics to as much as 20 feet high. “New technology is going to bring ceramics to the next level,” Blake says, “and can move ceramic artists into museums or corporate spaces, which will bring ceramics into the big time market where you see high prices.” “There has definitely been an aesthetic shift in the past few years,” says Liz O’Brien, owner of her eponymous gallery in New York. “The hand-built quality is what people respond to right now, in my opinion. So much is mass manufactured today, I find that my clients want unusual things, they want unique contemporary or vintage pieces. They don’t want what everyone else has. Things have to have a bit of soul to them.” O’Brien has been buying and selling ceramics since she opened her shop in the early 1990s. She started with French studio ceramicists, she says, before broadening out, and is delighted to see how the market has acquired a fresh taste for a variety of studio ceramics. “I look for makers who are grounded in the history of the medium, who know about the history of ceramics, are particularly skillful in their technique,” she says. “Our client buys collectible vintage furniture and ceramics, they mix things, they respond to the uniqueness of this kind of work.” Deborah Colman, from Pavilion Antiques, sees the change in attitude as part and parcel of a new understanding of ceramics no longer as decoration but as “situating the work in the conversation within architecture or within space as sculpture.” Context and the conversation around ceramics, for her, have been critical. “The conversation is no longer only about the vessel or its function, as many artists using clay have moved away from that being the only dialogue. I think designers and collectors are buying form, volume, color, many of the same concerns when they buy sculpture.” Assemblage Wall Installation in stoneware by Pamela Sunday, made for the entry of Studio Van den Akker’s New York showroom. Each installation is site-specific, unique, and handmade to order, in sizes ranging from 10 sq. ft. to over 25 sq. ft. Photo: Brittany Ambridge courtesy of Van den Akker.