89 - A celebration of contemporary ceramics in Andenne

Ceramics Now Weekly #89 features the Perspectives Festival of Ceramic Art Andenne, the week's news in the ceramics world, and recently featured ceramic artists.

Jun 03, 2025

Hello! Welcome to the 89th edition of Ceramics Now Weekly. This is Vasi Hirdo, the founding editor of Ceramics Now.

I hope you are doing well today 👋

Before we begin, I'd like to share a few images from Alive & Unfolding, the exhibition I curated in Namur, Belgium. If you have a chance to visit before it closes on August 17, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Clicking the image above will take you to the full presentation on Ceramics Now, where you'll find many more views from the show.

Let's see what's new.

Perspectives Festival 2025: A new vision for Ceramic Art Andenne

In 2025, Ceramic Art Andenne enters a new chapter under the name Perspectives Festival, a title that reflects a deepened commitment to highlight contemporary ceramic art practices. Conceived as a triennial, this year’s festival brings together over one hundred artists from around the world in eight exhibitions across Andenne, Belgium.

This year’s edition stands out for its strong program and bold spirit of collaboration that defines it. At the heart of the festival are two major international exhibitions—Talisman and Authentique—which offer a rich panorama of current artistic approaches, from deeply symbolic interpretations to technical contemporary forms. Germany is the guest country in an exhibition curated by Wolfgang Lösche, presenting a survey of exceptional German ceramic artists. The solo exhibition of Belgian artist Nathalie Doyen invites visitors into a meditative world shaped by repetition, while Connexions, produced in collaboration with the international Ceramic Brussels fair, highlights promising new voices in European ceramics. At the Maison des Associations, the exhibition Fusion of Visions gathers members of the International Academy of Ceramics (IAC) from the Benelux region.

Extending the festival’s reach through a new collaboration with Le Delta Namur, the Alive & Unfolding exhibition, curated by Vasi Hirdo, presents an exceptional contemporary ceramics exhibition. Featuring twenty-two artists from fourteen countries, the exhibition presents a vibrant collection of sculptures that challenge the boundaries between the figurative and the abstract.

More Reshaping Than Self-Made / Self-Made: Impossible

By Unu Sohn

There is the illusion that coming of age is a singular occurrence in a person’s lifetime. We each supposedly transition from child to adult and join a collective of fully developed, grown people capable of regularly changing the duvet cover and filing taxes. We know who the right person to marry is and how to cook a medium-rare steak. In reality, a person is coming of age again, again, and again. To experience life on earth as a human being is to constantly re-evaluate what I value, whether I am successful or fulfilled, what I need to change.

With the exhibition Self-Made: Reshaping Identities at the Foundling Museum in London, four ceramic artists demonstrate how clay is a particularly fitting material metaphor for life. As a substance, clay challenges duality: it is both wet and dry, soft and brittle, durable and fragile. There are many different methods of working with clay ranging from slip-casting to coiling, with the sourced materials interacting in infinite combinations, yet all undergoing the same chemical change in the kiln. The expansive nature of the material and discipline is evident within the walls of the Foundling Museum’s basement gallery housing Self-Made. The four distinct personalities of the artists Phoebe Collings-James, Matt Smith, Renee So, and Rachel Kneebone are clearly evident.

Sticks, Stickness, Stickiness

By Joshua G. Stein

Objecthood is complicated. At first, we might assume that we easily know how to draw the profile of a tree. Maybe we understand that in the interest of time we might not be able to outline every single branch, every single leaf, or every single root, but with enough time we imagine we can trace this intricate outline. Yet we know that the intake of carbon dioxide and output of oxygen molecules through tree leaves into the atmosphere thwarts our notion of boundaries. Recent scientific studies reveal a “mycorrhizal network” composed of myecelium that connects trees with their neighbors to share water, nitrogen, carbon and other minerals, making it even more difficult to separate a tree from the forest, or even from its neighboring species.

And yet, we are not entirely wrong when we draw our simplistic profile of our tree. Its objecthood is still partially intact. The practices of Del Harrow and Yonatan Hopp deftly examine the complexities of objecthood, neither stripping it of its discrete importance nor denying its dissolve into larger systems. In the work of both artists, distinct elements are rendered more so by their dramatic juxtaposition against disparate materials—a wood stick connects to a gooey blob of glazey clay or a ceramic stump sits atop a roughly-hewn wooden pedestal—but they still form parts of a larger art object.

New featured artists in Ceramics Now

The week’s news in the ceramic world

⭐ Applications are open for CERCO, the XIX International Prize for Contemporary Ceramics, until June 22. The competition is open to all contemporary artists, emerging or established, individuals or members of collectives. Without thematic restrictions, it is one of the longest-running ceramic awards, showcasing the evolution and trends in contemporary ceramics. Thirty works will be selected for exhibition at the Aragón Crafts Center in Zaragoza (Spain) from September to November 2025. Prizes include the €6,000 CERCO Award.

👉 Applications for the Kikuchi Biennale XI Ceramic Competition are open until the end of June. The biennale exhibition will take place at the Kikuchi Kanjitsu Memorial Tomo Museum, Tokyo, between December 13, 2025 and March 22, 2026. Several prizes will be awarded, including a Grand Prize worth ~$14,000. Application fee: ~$42.

🔥 The June Steingart Art Gallery at Laney College (Oakland, CA) is accepting submissions for Stoked: Wood Fired Ceramics, a national juried exhibition dedicated to the fiery art of wood-fired ceramics. This exhibition aims to bring together the most compelling examples of this age-old ceramic technique nationwide. Submission deadline: June 30, 2025.

🎥 The third edition of the Manises International Ceramics Film Festival (CICEMA) will take place from November 21 to 23 at the Germanias Auditorium in Manises, Spain. Organized in one of Spain's historic ceramics cities, CICEMA has become a key event in Europe dedicated to films about ceramics. Last year's edition received over 60 submissions from 18 countries and attracted an audience of around 1,000. Applications are open to filmmakers working with ceramics-related themes.

👌 Three exceptional exhibitions are on view through June 29 at The Clay Studio, Philadelphia. In Another Way of Knowing, Jeanne Blissett Robertson explores the Arctic's fragile ecosystems through sculpture and science. In holy.body, Michael Biello reflects on queer intimacy, spirituality, and performance. Small Favors 2025 celebrates its 19th edition with nearly 400 small-scale works that showcase big ideas and diverse material approaches.

☀️ Artists based in Australia are invited to apply to this year's Shelley Simpson Ceramics Prize. Now in its fifth year, the prize is open to all Australian ceramicists and awards innovative, sustainable and emerging talent with a $10,000 fund to support and accelerate their practice. This year, for the first time, the selected finalists will be celebrated in a four-week exhibition hosted at Craft Victoria. Applications are due June 30.

🌿 Marking ten years of community and craft, The Kiln Rooms Festival takes place June 5–8 across two Peckham studios (London). The event features the Members Show with works by 80–100 emerging ceramicists, live demos, talks, and a community clay project with Clayground Collective. Visitors can also view Master Sketches, a charity exhibition of original drawings by leading ceramic artists. Free and open to all, the festival offers a rare chance to explore studios, meet makers, and support FiredUp4, a charity expanding access to ceramics.

⛩️ Experience Japan's rich ceramic traditions firsthand with Trip2Japan, led by Sheri Leigh O'Connor. These immersive tours, Ceramics, Sushi, and Sightseeing, take participants to historic pottery towns, artist studios, museums, and cultural sites. Alongside unforgettable landscapes and cuisine, travelers explore the legacy of Japanese ceramics that has shaped studio pottery worldwide.

📍 Several exciting ceramics events are taking place in the coming weeks. cerARTmic Madrid (June 5-8) brings contemporary ceramics to the Spanish capital with an international fair. On June 7-8, Festival de la céramique à Nantes is taking place in Nantes, France, and on June 8-9, the Ceramic Market Andenne returns to Andenne, Belgium, showcasing a fantastic selection of ceramic artists. The Höhr-Grenzhausen Ceramics Market will gather artists and visitors in Germany's historic ceramics hub between June 14 and 15.

Do you have news that you’d like to share with the world? Let us know—reply to this email.

Exhibitions

Discover these ceramic exhibitions that were recently featured in Ceramics Now.

🔍 What's on View

A selection of ceramic exhibitions currently on view around the world.

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