Carol Young (Uruguayan, b.1952), born in Uruguay, has been living and making art in Colombia since the 1980s. Using ceramic as her primary medium, Young’s installations and sculptures transcend standard perception of the material, creating work that is unique, challenging, and beautiful. Her recent investigation explores the realms of memory, history, and our conceptions of paper. 

Working from an intricate network of memory, both personal and collective, Young explores their unexpected influences: how we perceive the world and how we interact with others. Young’s installations evoke these subliminal memories through a dialogue with the emptiness and freshness of a blank page. Drawing on an image that may refer to an ancient library composed of paper and parchment, her work conjures up the sign-filled archive of the many individual moments of experience—unknown and hidden information that yearns to be classified, reviewed, and studied. 

Young has shown her work throughout Colombia and Latin America, and she has received numerous awards and honors. In May 2014, Young’s work was exhibited in the Bard Graduate Center Gallery in New York as part of the exhibition Waterweavers, curated by Jose Roca, adjunct curator of Latin American Art at the Tate Gallery in London.

​https://www.artnet.com/artists/carol-young/biography

I find this work very evocative, I love the curved lines and forms of the separate components and the way the individual elements are connected together, these biomorphic forms resonate with the things that interest me about ceramic sculpture and I find her pieces very inspiring. There is an elegance to the surfaces where she has opted to omit the use of a glaze, giving the pieces a more natural organic look. I am continuing to wrestle with the use of glazes in my own work, and am still uncertain as to whether the glazes I am selecting enhance or detract from the overall visual narrative for the pieces.

Although Heather's main focus for her work is to create decorative objects, the work she produces has intricate details inspired by and derived from the natural world, resulting in pieces that are organic but with precision and intricate detail. I feel that some of  her pieces are a bit too literal in nature for me but I find the detail of her sculptures inspiring and admire her ability to identify a market for her work and then develop and build on that to create a successful business. 

I work in a decorative ceramic expression that involves both form and decoration. Decoration is integrated into the form and the form itself is spatially decorative
The sculptures are all unique. The process is based on hand-built elements built up in terms and variations or freehand modelled objects. I focus on a high level of craftsmanship, with ceramics being the central part of my works.
My works are glazed and fired several times to achieve a perfect and monochrome surface. In contrast to the object, you can see colored strings or hand-decorated patterns to express the influence of the sculpture´s movements and how to put the works into a spatial context showing a strong graphic expression.

https://www.steen-ipsen.dk/about/

Ipsen hand builds each element then assembles them together, he is interested in playfulness and movement in his pieces, he focusses much more on process and finish and less on a specific narrative, for him the joy is in the hands on process of making, he doesn't use any casting or wheel throwing in his work, but yet they do have a mechanical precision to them. I like the use of pvc cord, there is something more chaotic about how these look, almost like he's trying to hold everything together, perhaps a metaphor for control, who knows? I can see myself making work in this way and recognise that I can take my pieces in two very different directions. I can make work that continues to strive for that meticulous surface and utilises simple abstract forms, or I can make work that is more like that of Toni Losey, where every piece is very different, the surfaces and additions are more textural and the pieces have a more surreal 'other worldly' look to them. This is an important decision to make and one that I need to be confident I can sustain going forward into my final module.

Am interested in Aamir's work as she focusses on the macro structure of plants and creates pieces that are very organic, she uses lots of surface texture and detail and her use of colour is really clever. All her work is in porcelain and the various structures she achieves are  quite remarkable. Aamir admits to not drawing out or planning her pieces before hand rather letting them evolve organically and I find this process of making much more akin to my own. I find her pieces very inspiring, many are very small which makes the complexity of there construction even more impressive.

After my last assessment and more recently after I had begun to push the work I was doing I revisited Toni Losey's work and hadn't realised how amazing it is! The pieces are so inspirational to me, I would love to be able to get to a place where my work is evolving like her has done. There is a discipline and meticulous nature to her approach to making, she uses the potters wheel but the resulting forms do not reveal this, they could have been hand built with pinch pots and coils or even slip cast or press moulded. I think she achieves an incredible  aesthetic where there is a tension between the surreal and uncanny and the organic world. Could they be macro versions of seeds, sea creatures, funghi or plants.

I have been concerned about making work that was obviously trying to mimic the real world, getting hung up on things ending up being too mushroom looking or plant looking. Looking again at Losey's work I can see that if I just keep pushing, experimenting, using colour and glaze in different ways there is potential to achieve something that could be really interesting and evocative. I need to be braver!

The main interest I have in Kupferschmidt's work is in his glaze use, he uses Gloop, crawl and lichen glazes in his pieces to really good effect. I am now exploring recipes in books and on Glazy where I can try and create similar versions of these. To date I have only done limited experimenting with glaze and have really enjoyed this so I plan to continue to develop this side of my practice into the next module.

My interest in Beate Kuhn's work is all about the aesthetics of her pieces, she made all of her pieces on the wheel and seemed to thrive on the meticulous, mathematical almost scientific approach to her making. This style of making is the antithesis of my own, I am much more interested in the organic evolvement of the pieces, rather than meticulously planning out where every tiny component in a piece will be placed. There are loose narratives to Kuhn's work, rhythm and movement being some, but her aesthetic seemed to mainly lie in the precise construction and purity of the forms as they were all made using a mechanical process. To me they are evocative, tactile, slightly odd and surreal looking with a suggestion of organic matter or cell like structures and this is why I am interested in her work. 

Eva Zethraeus (Swedish, b. 1971) is a ceramic artist based in Gothenburg, Sweden. Working primarily in porcelain, she creates exquisite and tenuous biomorphic sculptures that are at the intersection between representational and abstract. Inspired by marine life, Japanese Zen Buddhist gardens and viruses, Zethraeus’ works examine the beauty and phenomena of life cycles and replication, and the unpredictable variances that occur.   
https://www.hostlerburrows.com/artists-designers/eva-zethraeus

Ezeth's work is made in components and assembled, like Beate Kuhne she uses the potters wheel to create her pieces. Her work is also organic in style and aesthetic and like Kitson she is interested in natural forms and takes inspiration from the natural world. I do like these pieces, technically I think they are amazing, her construction is immaculate and it's all made in porcelain. Although there is some variety to the style of her pieces I do feel that using the wheel in the way she does seems to  restrict the potential shapes and forms that she can create. I can see why they appeal to people, the pieces echo sea creatures, plant life, organic matter, they are beautiful to look at and slightly uncanny. 

Juz Kitson is an Austrailian artist who uses clay as the predominant material in her surreal, mixed media sculptures.

Juz Kitson’s works are resplendent and dense. Complex and large scale, they are exquisite musings on nature’s cycles of metamorphosis, decay, beauty and abundance. As a contemporary multi-disciplinary artist, Kitson pushes the boundaries of material and meaning through her sculptural works. Kitson has mastered the use of porcelain and other clay bodies through intricate hand-building and slip casting. Like alchemy, Kitson incorporates these ceramic elements with hot and flameworked glass and natural materials, such as reclaimed animal pelts and furs and husks and tusks. The seductive combination of the construction and assemblage with hand built forms and found objects couple to form Kitson’s unsettling evocative morphologies. https://sophiegannongallery.com.au/artist/juz-kitson/ Accessed Sept 2022

Kitson's works holds fascination for me on a number of levels, her process of making, the use of assemblage of cast ceramics combined with other materials. The narratives in her work explore  the cyclical nature of life and our connection and role within this cycle and this has echoes to my own interests in the natural world and funghi. There is also a surreal, other worldly quality to the work which is simultaneously evocative and un-nerving and I am inspired to see if I can push my own work to develop in such a way.