pottery Archives - Seven Limes Pottery

Marlborough School Tile Project

James Donegan, took a beginner pottery course with us here in Manchester. An architect for Tim Groom Architects at the time, and now a fully qualified architect, with a RIBA and Mecanoo award to his name, and running the creative studio Dematerial.

After an exhibition at Manchester Craft and Design Centre creating an impressive structure inspired by mathematical designs in nature, James took a mould making and slip casting course with us. Following this he designed and 3D printed some tiles for a design project of Marlborough School in Macclesfield.

Involving the teachers and students “to design a space that is flexible, exciting and theirs.” As architects they unfortunately “had to reject suggestions that mashed potato, Lego and bubbles were suitable materials to build the school.” James made slip casting moulds for the tiles and had sample tiles produced at 7 Limes Pottery, using glaze designed by Sam Andrew. Their proposal won the Manchester Society of Architects award for un-built community project that year!

A project page for the school can be seen here.

At 7 Limes Pottery we’ve actually had a number of team building workshops with architect groups.A Architects we find are interested in materials, especially ceramics. So pottery is a great team building activity for architects. Do get in touch to talk to us about arranging a team building workshop or for helping to design and make ceramic samples for a specific architecture project.

Trace Exhibition Omved Gardens, in pictures

Trace, an exhibition by Thrown Contemporary and collaborators, was set in the beautiful glass houses at Omved Gardens in Highgate London, during Chelsea Fringe Festival. The sun beaming down lit the space brightly, with vegetative flowering, by sustainable floral design studio Meta Fleur, adorning it’s plinths, hanging from struts, and intertwining between art pieces throughout. Alongside a host of events, including supper evenings, pot making, and fermentation workshops among others, 12 distinctive art collections came together. From natural ink painting’s to exceptionally blown glass, Thrown’s main discipline is presenting ceramic works and exhibiting pottery from upcoming and established ceramicists and potters.

Barcelona based Roger Coll’s curvaceous tubular ceramic sculptures appeared throughout with different brightly coloured matt and gloss surfaces, and use various hand-builidng, mould making and slip casting techniques. John Mackenzie’s traditional wood fired wheel thrown pots, with ash glazes, are fired in his own built anagama style wood firing kiln. His pieces followed him to Stoke on Trent’s Clay College Stoke, for a teaching workshop, a college originally set up by Kevin Millward and Lisa Hammond. Our own Sam Andrew’s sculptural nerikomi pots featured prominently and was the first time he presented work on this scale. All his pieces were made in studio in 7 Limes Pottery’s kilns. Made from years old waste material of nerikomi batches, where clay slabs are meticulously layered, compressed, sliced and pressed, the waste of which is joined together and manipulated to form large belied and highly patterned forms. Sam’s work combines hybrid pottery making methods of press-moulding, slabbing, coiling and throwing to achieve the sculptural pots and surfaces.

See Trace’s exhibition catalogue below for a more in-depth read about the exhibition and it’s artists.

Featured image credit Will Hearle.