Peter Lane
Photo by Peter Duyan
Brooklyn ceramicist Peter Lane has made tableware, tables, vases (like the one above and those in the right of the photo below) and lamps whose crackled surface looks like the peeling, papery bark of the birch tree. “That wasn’t my intention,” Lane admits. “It ended up being a popular technique and something I really enjoy doing.”
Other projects of Lane’s were much more premeditated. The installation below, ‘Seabed I,’ began as an idea during a visit to the Hall of Human Origins in New York’s Museum of Natural History.
“There is a life-sized diorama of a European Ice-Age family and the house they built from 15 tons of mammoth bones. Did they have a sense, 15,000 years ago, of how gorgeous their home was? Or were they simply sheltering themselves from the cold?” he asks.
Lane says he found the structure breathtaking. “It’s an abstract sculpture made from unaltered found objects, and one of the first recorded works of ‘architecture’ in the West.
Lane makes each of the ceramic elements in ‘Seabed’ by hand. “I start with thin, soft slabs of a course clay mixture,” Lane explains. “I cut out the shape of each piece, then mold and bend each half. Then I join the halves together to make the complete shape.”
When the clay is almost dry, he uses various scraping tools to etch a texture into the surface. “I want the surface to look old and weathered, like whales teeth or dinosaur bones. For the finish I paint on layers of different porcelain slips that crackle as they dry and sink into the clay.”
Before the final firing, he stains the surface with metal oxides to bring out the texture.
“I wanted the piece to seem weightless and floating, so I designed a steel armature that attaches invisibly to the floor,” Lane says. The pieces are threaded on to the steel to appear as if they are suspended. “My idea was to create a monumental screen, something transformed from nature, a transcendent object, a ceramic work of art,” Lane adds.
I’ll be posting more about Lane’s other work in the next few days, so check back soon!
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