People who pot: Contemporary ceramics highlight the traditional craft

A collection of ceramic pieces showing the diversity of the clay form and its material application is being presented at London’s MDR Gallery at Coal Drops Yard. Work by more than ten top international artists and designers illustrates the myriad ways clay can be interpreted in a contemporary aesthetic, where texture and colour become forms of exploration and expression of this hand-worked craft. 

Coloured tower #011 from Romain Kloeckner’s Made With Pleasure collection stands between Mound by Victoria Andrew – a hand-built structure of brick clay and Canary Wharf clay – and the metal-glazed Iguana Vase by Floris Wubben. Wubben’s cylinder forms part of the Dutch designer-maker’s Pressed project, in which he explores the behaviour and properties of clay when moulded in a self-developed extrusion machine. 

Above these fascinating forms stands ‘Frosty Pink Spike’ from Erika Emerén’s Cake Vases series, looking like a tower of decadent pastry frosting. Swedish-born, Netherlands-based Emerén’s receptacles are based on a traditional Swedish ‘cake on a spit’ called spettekaka, decorated in a similar way. For her ceramic pieces, she applies slip through a piping bag onto a rotating papier-mâché cylinder, then fires it before applying heavy glazing that resembles the cake’s final decor. This solid form is contrasted by the delicately ethereal MOCA Open Structures by Studio Joachim-Morineau, their open-structure forms resembling miniature architectures, developed with an innovative dripping machine that drips the liquid earthenware in a certain rhythm to create a new ceramic language.

Other must-see pieces include a bold yellow coiled pot made of vitrified stoneware, as well as clay and resin structures resembling a water tower and coal bunker, and sets of dishes in ‘toasted’, ‘flecked’, ‘buff’ and ‘grogged white’ finishes.

Crowd Pleaser (People Who Pot) runs until 7 April 2019 at MDR Gallery, Coal Drops Yard