About Andy van Vliet Ceramics

Who 

I’m a studio potter working in Sheffield; living in a dense, busy city, yet privileged to work in a garden studio surrounded by trees and with views from my home to the Peak District. This symbiotic balance echoes my professional background, as a landscape architect and an engineer, bringing together complementary skills and sensibilities to inform my pottery practice; one that combines intuition, technical capability and a search for an aesthetic rightness.

What

I’m an habitual maker with regular kiln firings producing distinctive, one-off contemporary pots; sculptural objects that retain a functional purpose. Making vases, jars, and bowls, I commit myself to a limited number of forms and work ‘in a series’; each piece different whilst exploring ideas of composition, materiality and colour.

Why

Stirred by the wonder of making objects, I value the pleasure that well-crafted handmade artefacts can bring to the home whilst making art both more accessible and participatory. My pots are to be touched and held, as well as seen; engaging the senses in a richer aesthetic whilst quietly speaking of the value of craft and making.

In design and technique, I draw liberally from contemporary and historic examples. Learning from earlier masters is both to understand their iconic style and in so doing free oneself from a devotional imitation. The point, for me, is not whether a potter has been influenced by another, but how that influence has been put to work.

How

My practice draws on a range of craft skills from different disciplines, expressed through contemporary forms and with a raw aesthetic; where vitality, natural imperfection and balanced asymmetry combine to create space for the viewer’s own engagement.

Work begins on the wheel, a quick process, where the first sculptural forms emerge through capturing the centrifugal energy of throwing. I work standing up; in a deep concentration whilst working with the clay. Starting with the basic thrown volumes, I adopt more sculptural approaches moving forwad working in both an additive and reductive manner. I’m looking for an organic rightness in an object according to it’s own emerging proportions; I spend time researching, drawing, and exploring possibilities but, in the act of making multi-sensory objects, there’s no way to fully know the outcome until the work is complete.

Where

My Sheffield studio is very much part of the making process and a literal container. I use a collection of different tools and homemade gadgets; some designed for working with clay and some borrowed from other crafts, along with two kilns; one electric and one gas. The studio also acts as a visual library; providing garden views and an accumulation of work lining the walls helping to fuse a technical understanding with visual imagination.

As well showing my work in galleries, I regularly participate in the annual Open Up festival in Sheffield and welcome visitors to my studio, by appointment, all year round.

Get in touch to arrange a visit, shop, or to discuss working together.