These Classical-Meets-Contemporary Ceramics Are a Major Discovery

It's not every day that we make a discovery on the level of Nicolette Johnson, when some random Instagram rabbit hole leads us to a trove so vast we can hardly believe no one had tipped us off to it sooner. But that's exactly what happened last month, when we stumbled onto an image of Johnson's vases and found ourselves practically hyperventilating — not just over the works themselves, but the fact that the young Brisbane-based talent only started working with ceramics at all less than two years ago.
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These Ceramics in a Former French Salon Are the Exact Amount of ’80s Nostalgia We Need Right Now

When Italian designer Valentina Cameranesi and curator Matylda Krzykowski first saw the former hairdresser's shop in Toulon, France — where the interior design portion of the annual Design Parade festival is held this year — its windows were plastered with the word "Féminin." Perhaps it was fate, because the word is an apt reference to Cameranesi’s work, which is on view in the former salon in her first solo exhibition until September 24.
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Six Talents to Watch from RCA’s 2017 Graduate Show

Despite continued uncertainty about the effect Brexit might have on applications from students abroad, this year’s Royal College of Art graduate show was a celebration of global design talent, showcasing some of the best emerging talents from the EU and beyond. Here are six of our favorites.
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This Heath Ceramics Alum Just Made the Chicest Salt Lamp We’ve Ever Seen

A little more than a decade ago, when Christina Zamora was just an art-school grad living in the Bay Area, she landed a job that would go on to inform her life and her practice in immeasurable ways: She became a designer for Heath Ceramics, the midcentury California pottery brand whose early-2000s revival coincided with Zamora's tenure there. "I was surrounded by her way of thinking and working every single day. This experience had a profound impact on how I approach design." That becomes clear from the moment you encounter the first product made by Zamora's year-old, Oakland-based studio, Brave Matter.
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Ana Kras Natalie Weinberger

Ana Kras and Natalie Weinberger’s Powerhouse Collab at Picture Room

On view through August 20th at Brooklyn’s Picture Room, Family pairs pencil drawings by artist and designer Ana Kraš with stacked stoneware sculptures — each comprised of a set of functional vessels wheel-thrown by Brooklyn ceramicist Natalie Weinberger — in an exploration of emotional interplay between inanimate objects. “We started calling each set a family,” Weinberger says, “because we’re working with separate figures that share an emotional attachment.”
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When Paintings Become Sculptures: Jaime Keiter’s Frank Stella–Inspired Ceramics

When Jaime Keiter made a move to Atlanta last year, she decided it was time focus on her artwork, which included a series of simple, geometric pencil drawings on paper. “Moving to a new place gave me a new perspective on life, and I had less pressure to make art that was formulaic,” explains Keiter. After a friend suggested they join a ceramic studio on a whim, Keiter’s vision for her one-of-a-kind ceramic sculptures became fully formed. “I had been thinking of a way to make paintings that are unexpected — in a medium other than paper and wood. In the ceramics studio, it all sort of clicked."
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Natalie Weinberger’s Ceramic-Topped Tables at The Primary Essentials

Earlier this year, Natalie Weinberger struck up a collaboration with Peter Thorne, a woodworker in the Berkshires with whom she’s developed a series of ceramic-topped tables on turned-wood legs. Those tables are debuting this week as part of Sight Unseen Presents at The Primary Essentials, the Atlantic Avenue design shop owned by Lauren Snyder, who was one of the first to carry Weinberger’s work. We recently photographed Weinberger’s Brooklyn studio but asked Snyder, who knows her work better than anyone, to conduct the interview.
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The Candy-Colored Ceramics Collection We’re Coveting

The new spring collection from Felt + Fat — the Philadelphia-based ceramics studio founded by RISD architecture grad Wynn Bauer and former Tyler School of Art glass major Nate Mell — looks like its cups, plates and bowls were colored with the powder of chalky-sweet candy hearts. Featuring matte pale pinks and swirls of sage, plus a bright and poppy blue and yellow, the tableware is as suitable for a shelf display as it is for a bustling dinner party — after all, the porcelain clay pieces can be found in restaurants all around the Philly scene.
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Week of February 6, 2017

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Some of our favorite interiors in recent memory, featuring Japanese-inspired minimalism, rattan-covered walls, abstract art, '70s-style couches, and a trompe l'oeil staircase to nowhere.
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Look Inside the Practice of Four Up-And-Coming Ceramicists

What we found at RCA's annual Work in Progress exhibition, in the Ceramics & Glass program, was a study in experimentation: clay that had been manipulated into terrazzo-like slabs, perforated bricks, stringy lumps, punched-in blobs, donut-like lamps, and meticulous geometrics, and almost nothing that looked like it had been turned on a traditional potter's wheel.
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Five New Ceramics Collections We’re Feeling Right Now

Sometimes we get the feeling that we have altogether enough stuff. But then the period between Thanksgiving and New Year's Eve happens, and we realize that we somehow don't have all the requisite items for serving food, displaying flowers, or generally decking out our dinner table in a manner befitting a design editor. So this round-up couldn't have come at a better time: Meet five new ceramicists creating work that's sculptural but functional, minimal but avant-garde, and generally chic as hell.
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