Friday 31 May 2013


Went to Munich a few weeks ago to see The Knife. We visited Haus der Kunst, a gallery in an amazing building that apparently was one of Hitler's favourites in the city. This brochure was inside, it's designed by BaseDesign and Funny Paper. I love the orange/ purple colour scheme. I don't know if it is risographed or digitally printed but it was really nice to see such a large gallery have such a beautiful pamphlet for it's events. Even the staples are orange!
The fluted bowl I mentioned in a previous post. SO GOOD

Thursday 30 May 2013

Made a huge plinth with Susie. Took it down today because it was too big. Lol

For my brother's birthday. I'd like to do a ceramics series of these women. Or prints.


Edith Heath, such a sassy lady. Would love to a. have that studio full of tableware sets b. wear that blouse when throwing pots 






Some of my most favourite Korean ceramics. I made these photocopies about a year ago and can't find the book in the library they were from. I would love to take a trip to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and look at their collection. I love the vase with faceted sides in the top images, and it really reminds me of a bowl in Bernard Leach's study collection of ceramics. We were lucky enough to see his collection on a trip to the Craft Study Centre a few months ago, if you request in advance you can see their ceramics storage rooms and use the reference library, both of which are brilliant. 


Some new bowls on the way.

 Been trying to decide on the colour for my book cover. It's going alongside mainly blue/ green bowls on a long display plinth.



I have been reading Orphan Pamuk's book, The Innocence of Objects. It is the accompanying text to The Museum of Innocence in Istanbul, a museum that Pamuk made to illustrate and enhance his novel of the same name. 

The museum is split into sections or cases, that go through the novel's chapters. I particularly liked no. 68., 4,213 Cigarette Stubs. Edmund de Waal wrote in a review of the book in The New York Times, "There is an arrangement of 4,213 cigarette stubs, of which Pamuk writes: 'As Kemal had asked of me, I wrote under each and every one of Fusun's cigarette butts the note our protagonist had made about that particular day. This took me the entire summer of 2011...I felt more like a craftsman than a writer.' "

“As far as I know this is the first museum based on a novel...But it’s not that I wrote a novel that turned out to be successful and then I thought of a museum. No, I conceived the novel and the museum together.” -Orphan Pamuk, quote from J. Michael Kennedy's article in the NY Times, April 29 2012.
Image from http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com
The museum apparently cost Pamuk all of his winnings from the Nobel Prize In Literature, around 1.5 million dollars. In the book he writes that he collected the objects (there are over a thousand) over the years whilst writing the book. He also writes very interestingly about the changes he experienced in Instanbul during the time he was writing and his observations on the flea shops and markets. I go to flea markets regularly and find them to be a really interesting social commentary, they are often the contents of house clearances. You get to see the whole contents of somebody's home. It is also interesting to see how the stall holders placement of value on different objects or trends changes over time.