.sunday coffee : tom phardel.

This past Friday, Eric and I visited Pewabic Pottery down in Detroit. Pewabic is a ceramic studio that was started by Mary Stratton in the Arts & Crafts days. It's a pretty important place in Detroit. To us art nerds anyway. They just so happen to be hosting a solo exhibit by one of my teachers at the College for Creative Studies, Tom Phardel. Tom is the chair of the ceramics section at school. I've always admired his work, so I was pretty excited to go.

I love his use of gilding. It adds another dimension to his work, one that is completely unexpected. Given the names of some of his pieces in this show, his work seems to reference the idea of temple. The gilding, I think, is a beautiful way of bringing that in, referencing other cultures' use of gold in temple spaces.

The other thing that really stood out to me was the super thick layers of glass on his rectangular pieces. I just so happened to run into him Saturday night at another one of my teachers' show openings. I pretty much bombarded him as soon as I saw him walk in, asking about this glaze. It isn't a glaze at all. The rectangles are bricks that he chooses out of the glass kilns. So, the glass has accumulated, I guess, onto the brick through the use of the kiln. I think. Anyway, it's beautiful, especially with the addition of the gilding.

Hope you enjoy :) I really wish I would have brought the better camera. My little one just doesn't do so well in mixed lighting. So, I apologize for the less-than-awesome quality of most of these photographs. They really don't do his work justice!


Happy Sunday!