JOANNA BIRD GALLERY is delighted to announce that we are exhibiting at Ceramic Brussels for the very first time. Established in 2024, Ceramic Brussels is the first international contemporary art fair dedicated exclusively to ceramics and offers a unique platform to showcase the diversity and innovation within the practice.
This year, the gallery will be showing outstanding examples of contemporary work by a selection of international artists including Emmanuel Boos, Halima Cassell, Florian Gadsby, Hattori Makiko, and Rupert Spira. Celebrated works by Studio Pottery Masters, including Norah Braden, Joanna Constantinidis, Elizabeth Fritsch, Katherine Playdell-Bouverie, and Lucie Rie will also be on display.
The fair will run from 22nd January – 26th January 2025 at 3 Rue Picard, Brussels 1000, Belgium.
Emmanuel Boos discovered his craft as an adolescent and later began working in a pottery studio while pursuing academic studies. He then travelled and lived in South Korea and China where he developed an interest in Chinese glazes and porcelain. During his subsequent apprenticeship with Jean Girel, he perfection his knowledge of both ceramic bodies and high-temperature glazes, prompting him to undertake a practice-led PhD at the Royal College of Art.
‘My practice of glaze does not aim mastery nor domination. I do not have those ambitions nor do I wish to turn into a jealous potter as described by Claude Lévi-Strauss. I wish to slip into the glaze and develop a friendly relationship with chaos and eventually trust chance.’
Emmanuel has exhibited internationally, including at Design Basel/Miami, PAD London, and at the Kunsthalle Mannheim. In 2011 he was a Jerwood Makers Open Laureate, and from 2016 to 2019 was artist in residence at the Cité de la Céramique, Sèvres, Paris.
He lives and works between Paris and Mannheim.
(1901 – 2001)
Norah Braden is one of the foremost British potters of her time. After graduating with a diploma in painting at the Royal College of Art, she studied at the Leach Pottery from 1925 to 1928, where she became particularly interested in wood ash glazes. She subsequently worked alongside Katharine Pleydell-Bouverie at Coleshill for eight years, using ash glazes made from plants and wood on the estate.
She taught at Brighton and Central Schools of Art. Braden was a perfectionist, and destroyed many of the pots she made, to the extent that her work is now considered rare. She was thought by Leach to have the best eye of any of his pupils and is considered by many to have the greatest sensitivity to shape of any of the Leach pupils.
Born in 1975 in Pakistan, brought up in Lancashire and now living in Shropshire, Halima’s varied, multi-cultural background is tangibly present in her work. A natural creativity presented itself at an early age and was nurtured to fruition as Halima carved her way through an art-based education: an undergraduate degree in 1997 and an MA in 2002.
The culmination of this process is Halima’s precociously mature work. Fusing her Asian roots with a fascination for Mughal and African pattern work and a passion for architectural geometry, Halima’s work is intense yet playful, structured yet creative; substantial yet dynamic and invariably compelling in its originality.
In Halima’s work she combines strong geometric elements with recurrent patterns and architectural principles, her work utilises definite lines and dramatic angles. Halima concentrates on simple forms as the basis of her work in order to maximise the impact of the complex surface patterns in combination with heavily contrasting contours.
Elizabeth Fritsch trained as a musician before taking up pottery in 1966. She studied ceramics at the Royal College of Art under Hans Coper. After leaving in 1971, she worked in the Bing and Grondahl factory in Copenhagen where she held her first exhibition. She was a major prize winner in the Royal Copenhagen Jubilee Competition. In 1987, she set up her own studio in London and in that year, was chosen for the Bernard Leach Centenary Post Office Stamp issue with Hans Coper and Lucie Rie.
Her work can be seen in many public collections, including the Belle Rive Museum, Zurich, the Musée Des Arts Decoratifs, Paris, the Shigaraki Museum, Japan, and at the V&A. Joanna Bird curated a solo show for Elizabeth at The Fine Art Society in 2008.
FLORIAN GADSBY is a ceramicist based in London who has been making functional ceramics for the past six years. Making both individual one-off vessels and groups of pots, he complements their simple forms with delicate glazes which have crystalline structures. Having been an apprentice to Lisa Hammond MBE for three years and Ken Matsuzaki in Mashiko, Japan, Florian has learned thoroughly how to throw with efficiency and skill, constantly striving for sensibility and functionality in his work.
Hanne Heuch (born 1954, Oslo) studied ceramics at Bergen School of Arts and Crafts before graduating from the National College of Art and Design, Oslo in 1979. From 1988 to 1992 she was Professor and Head of Department at Bergen National Academy of the Arts. She currently teaches at the Academy of Design and Craft in Gothenburg.
Heuch has worked on several commissions for public buildings in Norway, using pigmented laminated building glass produced at Planglasteknik AB in Stockholm. Her work is included in many public and private collections: SKMU Sørlandets Kunstmuseum, Kristiansand, the Museum of Decorative Art and Design, Oslo, and the Museum of Decorative Art, Bergen.
Hattori Makiko is a Japanese artist working to create shapes resembling functional pots, then applying ribbons of porcelain to tightly fill the entire pot surface. Not following a design or motif she prefers to work in a meditative state on this repetitive procedure adding minute parts to complete the whole surface in total continuity.
Hattori says this about her work,
‘I would be happy if the audience can immediately be drawn into the work before any other explanation because of the visual and tactile impact of the surface.
The work involves an incessantly repetitive process, nonetheless I never get tired with this Zen-like operation. I confront this long procedure with a very relaxed transcendent state of mind’
Born in Berkshire, Katharine Pleydell-Bouverie grew up in a seventeenth century stately home. In the 1920s, she moved to London and visited Roger Fry at his Omega Workshops; this inspired her to attend the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London where she was a student of Dora Billington.
In 1924 Pleydell-Bouverie was taken on by Bernard Leach at his pottery in St. Ives. She remained at the Leach Pottery for a year and learnt alongside Michael Cardew, Shoji Hamada and Tsuronosuke Matsubayashi. The following year Pleydell-Bouverie started her first pottery with a wood-fired kiln in the grounds of her family estate at Berkshire. She used ash glazes, prepared from wood and vegetables growing on the estate. In 1946 she moved to her second pottery at Kilmington Manor in Wiltshire where she worked until her death in 1985. At Kilmington she used first an oil fired kiln, and then an electric one.
LUCIE RIE (1902 – 1995) studied ceramics at the Wiener Kunstgewerbeschule under Michael Powolny and Robert Obseiger. She showed her work in exhibitions concerned with the products of the Wiener Secession, including the Paris exhibitions of 1925 and 1936. In 1938 she emigrated to England and established her studio in Albion Mews, West London, where she remained for the rest of her working life.
Her earliest English works were ceramic buttons, brooches, and tableware, which she made with the assistance of Hans Coper after the Second World War. In the decades following the war Rie developed a unique modernist style, bringing to it her infallible taste combined with a certain ‘English’ sense of balance between form and surface.
Lucie Rie’s work is in public collections all over the world.
Rupert Spira was born in London in 1960. He gained a degree at West Surrey College of Art and Design from 1978 – 80 under Henry Hammond and later trained with Michael Cardew at Wenford Bridge Pottery. In 1996 he set up his own studio at Church Farm, Shropshire.
The skill of throwing on a potter’s wheel is the basis of Rupert Spira’s work. Having been the apprentice to some major ceramic artists he sets very high standards in the craft of his art – making things larger and with extraordinary attention to detail than one might anticipate.
The versatility of his skills mean that works vary in scale from miniature to monumental and in decoration from monochrome to intricately hand-written texts. Rupert also painstakingly applies raised texts to some pieces, and in some cases poetry he has written himself.
MATTHEW WARNER completed his BA at Camberwell College of Art in 2010, before going on to study under Julian Stair as a QEST Scholar.
His work takes inspiration from the 18th-century potter Josiah Wedgwood, and seeks to explore how perceptions of status and luxury are reinforced through objects. He is particularly interested in the social connotations of pots throughout history, and in how they have been deployed to promote ideas of class, power, and even moral understanding.
Born in 1938 London, John Ward is regarded as one of Britain’s greatest potters. Influenced by ancient pre-glaze pottery from China and Cypress he was inspired by more modern influences such as Hans Coper’s formal strength, Lucie Rie’s colour palette and Ian Godfrey’s playful textures.
In 1966 Ward was accepted onto the Camberwell School of Art and Crafts Ceramics course after developing a fascination with pottery during Adult Education classes. After graduating he worked as a part time pottery teacher in London while also developing his studio. In 1979 he moved to Pembrokeshire where he still resides and works.
‘There is something compelling about the making of pots, regardless of function, which keeps me within the particular sphere; they are the focus of some many interests and associations. My aim is to make pots which have simple forms with integral decoration and aspects which can interact with the environment in interesting ways; to try and express a balance between these dynamic qualities and a sense of stillness or containment. Form above all, but expressed through light and colour’ – John Ward
We hope that you have enjoyed our exhibition for Ceramic Brussels 2025, and we look forward to seeing you again at COLLECT 2025.
We would like to thank all the artists, photographers Alick Cotterill.
With all good wishes,
Joanna and team
All images by Alick Cotterill and Sylvain Deleu
