Informazioni personali

La mia foto
Studio di ceramica-Pottery. After a long period of experimentation and testing at DOCKS POTTERY weʼd like to show our ceramic work. The works we produce come from the use of local red and white clay as well as semigres like the earth of Castellamonte. We make all our own glazes from formulae we found in an old ceramics manual, many of which we have modified after extensive testing and experimentation. All our glazes are lead free and contain no toxic substances. Docks Pottery via Valprato n°68 10155 Torino Italia f.digiovanni@iol.it

martedì 28 luglio 2009

The bags for Korea

On 2 August I am leaving for Seoul, to install the exhibition of Nathalie Djurberg a Swedish artist, in 2008 she had a solo show at the Prada Foundation, Nathalie was awarded the Silver Lion for a Promising Young Artist at the Venice Biennale in 2009.

I and my associates will expose video animations of Nathalie inside the Prada Transformer in Seoul. From 9 years I am working for my company ( Attitudine Forma) as technical manager of the works of contemporary art for the Prada Foundation in Milan and around the world. I work in korea last 10 days but I have programmed 4 days more to visit the Icheon Pottery Village where I'm going to see the Korean potters, the blog of "Bandana Pottery" gives much guidance to visit the potters, but unfortunately I do not have many days left. If any of you know or can tell me of potters in Korea I would be very grateful. I hope to make images from show you.

Ciao a Tutti a Presto
Ciao to all and see you soon





Portrait of Nathalie Djurberg. Photo by Hans Berg
'experiment', 2009 (installation, claymation, digital video and mixed media)image © designboom






The Prada Transformer is a rotating pavilion with four sides, designed to host fashion shows, exhibitions and film festivals, which can be transformed by turning it around to change the façade and the floor. Based on the form of the tetrahedron, it offers a series of different façades: a cross, a rectangle and a circle, which may be rotated as required to create walls or ceilings.The pavilion, located in Seoul near the sixteenth-century Kyeonghee Palace, is due to open on April 25 for the "Waist Down" exhibition curated by Miuccia Prada in collaboration with AMO presenting a selection of the designers skirts from the early '90s to the present.The exhibition will stay open until May 31.The Prada Transformer was designed by Rem Koolhaas with Kunlé Adeyemi and Alexander Reichert and built with the support of LG Electronics,Hyundai Motor Company and Red Resource.








venerdì 24 luglio 2009

The Beauty of Communication

If Kitty Shepherd and her daughter were not at St Ives and informed us of the Tate , I would not have known Lucie Rie and I would not have found me in front of the images of a beautiful exhibition in Tokyo at Issey Miyake's 21-21, called U-Tsu-Wadi. In addition I discovered the works of Jennifer Lee and Ernst Gamperl.
Maybe I will be working in museums and the way to display the workshow of art fascinates me, but this exhibition curated by the fashion designer Miyake and by the architect Tadao Ando is wonderful. When you find something beautiful is nice to communicate it to others.
Thanks Kitty

"Lucie Rie is one of the fortunate grandes dames of design whose contribution was recognised whilst she was still alive. Indeed the Austrian-born, London-based ceramicist was actually made a dame in 1991 for a lifetime’s service to the arts.
Yet, barely a decade after her death, her name is far from a household name amongst the design literate today. Perhaps this is due to nothing more than the fact that ceramics are a relatively niche area, falling between art and design. We’re sensing a pleasing surge of interest in her work though, which a new exhibition at Issey Miyake’s 21_21 will bolster.
The exhibition is called U-Tsu-Wa, which means vessels, and brings together around 100 works of Lucie Rie, together with pieces by Scottish ceramicist Jennifer Lee and German woodworker Ernst Gamperl. Miyake enlisted the help of
Tadao Ando for the exhibition design and, as you’d imagine with such a pairing of creative heavyweights, the result is surreal and spectacular. Centre stage is a gigantic pool of water on which Rie’s ceramics appear to float, highlighting the delicate fragility of her ceramics.
Miyake is something of a Lucie Rie fanatic and this is the second time he’s showed her work in Tokyo. He first discovered her twenty years ago by accident, stumbling across a book about her in a London bookshop. After visiting her studio he was hooked – ‘upon entering, meeting her and seeing some of her work I sensed ‘this is what it means to create’. I remember feeling energised as well as inspired’". ( text by Wallpaper*)


























The Issey Miyake Foundation presented the images of the building called '21_21 Design Sight' designed by Tadao Ando in Tokyo .
Lucie RieBorn in 1902 in Vienna, where she studied at the Kunstwerbeschule under Michael Powolny from 1922 to 1926. In 1938 she moved to London, where she lived in Albion Mews. She opened a pottery and button-making workshop, and was joined in 1946 by Hans Coper. She was knighted an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1968 and Commander in 1981. She was made a Dame in 1991. From 1949 she exhibits her work from in many cities in Europe and America. Her first one-person exhibition was held in Japan at the Sogetsu Gallery, Tokyo and Museum of Oriental Ceramics, Osaka, in 1989. In 1990, she stopped making pots. Lucie Rie died in 1995, aged 93.









Jennifer LeeBorn in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, in 1956. From 1975 to 1979 she studied ceramics and tapestry at Edinburgh College of Art. She then spent eight months on a scholarship to the USA where she researched South-West Indian prehistoric ceramics and visited contemporary West Coast potters. From 1980 to 1983 she continued her work in ceramics at the Royal College of Art in London. Since then she traveled extensively. Jennifer Lee has had retrospective exhibitions of her work at the Röhsska Musset in Göteborg, Sweden in 1993, and the Aberdeen Museum and Art Gallery, Scotland in 1994. Her work is represented in major public collections worldwide, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Jennifer Lee lives and works in London and regularly exhibits worldwide.





Ernst GamperlBorn in Munich, Germany in 1965. After graduating from high school he became a furniture maker apprentice and stumbled on woodturning by chance. Starting out an autodidact, he set up his own workshop in 1990. Ernst Gamperl has exhibited works in all over the world, including “the International Wood Turning Exhibition” (Victoria, Austria) in 1994, a traveling exhibition at Strenesse (Hamburg), Galerie Hilde Leiss in 1998, “Ernst Gamperl Volumes in Wood” at MDS-G in Tokyo in 2000, and so on. His objects are found in renowned museums all over the world, such as the Museum of Applied Art, Frankfurt and Fond national d’Art contemporain, Paris. He earned awards from the Danner Foundation in 1993 and 1999, and has winning prizes and awards as far afield as Germany, the USA and Australia.






P.S.
Help me! please correct my bad English. As said the grandfather of Jim : no "bad English" bat "Inglese di merda"

lunedì 20 luglio 2009

Egyptian dough

In my old manual "Ceramica Viva" of Nino Caruso, I'm trying to translate into English the chapter of Egyptian dough.
The Egyptian dough is a alkaline dough with vitrification to 920 - 940 ° C, is not very plastic but with the addition of Bentonite you can work at the wheel.
If any of you help me in the translation, I would be very happy
In anteprimale pictures of the chapter.


































































Islamic ceramics from the collection of MAO in Turin. The color turquoise is the alkaline glaze, the copper black oxide changes to turquoise-blue
P.S. in these hot nights
















martedì 14 luglio 2009

work in the Palazzo Madama

During this time I'm not just working in the pottery-studio, I am a bit depressed for not being able to work with continuity in my work with ceramics. I'm waiting for a period of calm in working with my company for museums. Yesterday we finished the show "VoltaPagina 6" at the Museum of Palazzo Madama. In 2006 I worked at the opening of the Palazzo Madama Museo Civico d'Arte Antica di Torino, has been a long job, for me it was interesting, because the fourth floor of the palace have exposed part of the collection of ancient ceramics.






After the closure of the Museum in 1988, which was followed by a difficult and confused period, in 1998 the "Palazzo Madama Project" was approved. This introduced a series of operations that led to the reopening of Palazzo Madama on 15 December 2006. The restoration of the architecture and the new arrangement of the displays, which met the most modern requirements in terms of exhibitions, use and services, were carried out together with important restructuring work. A total of more than 150 restorers worked on the building and no fewer than 71 companies were involved in restoring the architecture and the museum collections.The visit to the museum now covers four floors, each of which illustrates a historic period.The collections of works from the early centuries of the Middle Ages are housed on the moat floor, in the Medieval Stonework Collection, with sculptures, mosaics and jewellery (including the precious Desana Treasure). They range from Late Antiquity to Romanesque.The fifteenth-century rooms on the ground floor, on the other hand, contain a tour that leads more or less from the Gothic period to the Renaissance, with paintings, sculptures, miniatures and precious objects (such as the thirteenth-century casket of Guala Bicchieri), most of which come from sites in Piedmont and date from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. In the circular room in the Treasure Tower, one of the fifteenth-century towers of the old castle, there is a selection of masterpieces, including the famous Portrait of a Man by Antonello da Messina, and the Très Belles Heures de Notre Dame de Jean de Berry codex illuminated by Jan Van Eyck.
















The sixth Volta Pagina opens with an outstanding donation of
ancient books dating from the sixteenth to the nineteenth
century. These were offered to Palazzo Madama in late 2008 by a group of Piedmontese bibliophile of the Associazione Bibliofili Subalpini. Their gift reinforces the Museum’s ties with the world of collecting in Turin which, over the years, has added many treasures to the Museo Civico.
The precious bindings donated by Marco Albera, Livio Ambrogio, Giovanni Chieli, Federico Lobetti Bodoni, Francesco Malaguzzi, Gustavo Mola di Nomaglio and Giuseppe Pichetto will remain on display for three months in the showcases of the Chinese Room on the piano nobile. In the closet-gallery next door, the Piccola Guardaroba, there is an educational display programme illustrating the instruments and materials used in bookbinding workshops, with tools, plates, and decorative papers kindly lent to the Museum by Francesco Malaguzzi, Luciano Fagnola, and Emilio and Vittorio Soave. The exhibition is small, but it offers the public great insight into bookbinding techniques, providing information that would be impossible to include in the
historic showcases on the second floor of the Palazzo.
At the same time, in the graphics showcases on the ground
floor we are also showing a selection from an ample collection
of Renaissance bronze plaquettes. These are part of holdings
which have long been relegated to the storerooms of the
Museo Civico di Numismatica (closed in 2001). These items have been meticulously catalogued and, after an absence of 70 years, this has at last enabled them to make their return to the Museum.















works in storage

























Here, I enter some photos of our work so as not to bore you with the Italian museums.





















venerdì 10 luglio 2009

Ciao Keiko

This is the invitation that Keiko sent me from Sydney.
It will be difficult for me to be there for the opening of the exhibition. But as promised to keiko,I extend the invitation to all.



You are warmly invited to the opening of new porcelain installation work by
Kenji Uranishi & Keiko Matsui
at Helen Stephens Gallery and All Hand Made.
July 15 - August 12. Opening July 15, 6pm

Kenji Uranishi



















New works, Hand built in Southern Ice porcelain 2009

Keiko Matsui
Artist of the month at All Hand Made












Porcelain dishes with cobalt decoration d. various

Helen Stephens Gallery 254 Bronte Road,
Waverley 2024. t. +61 02 9386 4099

Helen@helenstephensgallery.com



lunedì 6 luglio 2009

ADOPT A POTTER

























Da : f.digiovanni@iol.it

Data : lunedì 29 giugno 2009 23.50

A : mazehill.pottery@virgin.net

Oggetto : BRAVI GOOD IDEA






Ciao, my name is Filippo Di Giovanni, I have a pottery studio in Turin Italy.

I thought that I had a fantastic idea, as is adopting children from a distance, sheeps and pigs or gardens, to adopt a potter in trouble with the payments of his studio of pottery, for not to quit and change jobs. But, I searched on Google "adopt a potter" and I find You, Bravi Good Idea.

Yours is a very interesting initiative for young potters, but the need in this time of economic crisis in Italy and other Countries,is also for first to adopt an old potter for not to close , so he can help the young potters.

Happy to have known You. I am ready to help You and

advertise inItaly and in my Blog ( Docks Pottery )

"Adopt a Potter"


Saluti
Filippo Di Giovanni
































ADOPT A POTTER©

It takes many years to train a studio potter
It always has done!

Unfortunately many of our art colleges are finding it difficult to offer throwing in any meaningful way, so it's more important than ever for any student who wishes to make functional and studio pots to have the opportunity of an apprenticeship .
ADOPT A POTTER, I believe is a simple idea, a way of helping to secure the future of studio potters.
I have personally funded and trained some 10 apprentices to date, the sale of mugs, and small standard ware goes some way currently to paying the stipend wage.
ADOPT A POTTER takes it a stage further. I would not only like to offer more training places myself to students but would also like to extend the scheme to other potters by offering them a student with funding in return for training.

You can help and get involved by:

•Donating by direct monthly payment
•Making a one off payment
•Help us fund raise

Registered Charity No. 1130164

Lisa Hammond
Mazehill Pottery
The Old Ticket Office
Woodlands Park Rd
Greenwich, SE10 9XE

P.S.





sabato 4 luglio 2009

Another test, another experiment

In Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, with my company Attitudine Forma, we are preparing a permanent installation of the artist Reinhard Mucha, we are covering the wood panels with quartz colored with epoxide resin, 4 mm thick (see photo), the panels will part of the installation. This type of coating is used for paving.
The professional in resin floors told me about these granules of quartz, colored at high temperature with different iron oxides. So I thought to take some of the different colors of quartz (the grains have a diameter of 0.30 mm.) And test what happens if mixed with the white clay in various percentages. I made three bowls, one for each different color of quartz for those percentages 3-5 -6%, and my intention is to cover later with the transparent glaze in second fire. I will tell you what happens in a few days ( I hope).








































































P.S.
However this experiment goes this Sunday we have a Super Crop,
and new guests, two canaries to the delight of Nilo and Lia our cats.







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