AP Shrewsbury (b. 1984)

A self taught Artist, Adam Shrewsbury is best known as a tattooist, but for the past several years his focus has been ceramics. Pottery takes shape through an ancient process best defined as alchemy. The clay begins soft and receptive, and ends firm and resolute. The mud has become stone. The surface decorations often pay homage to the history of tattooing, while at other moments they contrast each other playfully. No matter how unusual or surprising the compositions may be, they are all ultimately unified on the surface of the vessel. His work can be found in private collections world wide.

Drawing pottery

There’s something magical about drawing, you move your hand over the surface and something appears, perhaps something familiar, often something strange and new.  

(New is always strange, at first)

A drawing is a series of marks made on a surface with some type of mark making tool, whereby the tool is leaving a deposit on the surface, a trace of itself, a memory of where it has been.  It is a record of experience, showing the history of its own becoming as well as reflecting the mental-psychic space of the one who is drawing. 

Wheel turned pottery is not traditionally understood as drawing but I would like to suggest that it is a type of drawing, only instead of a drawing tool making marks upon a surface, rather the material itself is drawn into space. To draw with clay involves elements not necessarily present in normal drawings, such as speed, moisture, gravity, centrifugal force and plasticity. The clay is drawn into space, coaxed and invited into form. The hands are held in a particular relationship that shifts fluidly in the process. The fingers make a mudra-like gesture that guides the clay into itself and causes it to whirl upward into shape.  It is the ultimate drawing, not a two dimensional deposit on a surface but an instant manifestation in the third dimension. 

These pieces you see are a marriage of these two types of drawing. The forms were drawn into space and later the surfaces were drawn on as well, with glaze deposited onto glaze before the final firing. 

The drawings on the surface are a record of the moments and mental terrain I journeyed through while making them, they are familiar and mysterious even to me.

Just as there is mystery in watching something appear or disappear, so there is mystery in the form of a vase, while it is inherently empty it’s form is full. It’s outside is an expression of its inside. A pot is useful for its emptiness. 

Granite becomes clay, clay becomes stone, and with the influence of poetry, artworks are born