Toilet aficionados and sewer connoisseurs never settle for boring bathroom fixtures. For a cool $16,500, you too could impress your guests with a venus fly trap urinal, just like Oto Cadsky. Read the rest

Illustrator Ksenia Kopalova and ceramic artist Natalia Savinova combined their talents to make a mashup they call illustramics. Read the rest

Valerio Sommella just won a 2018 design award from The German Design Council for these disorienting centerpiece plates he created for Il Coccio. Read the rest

Sculptor inaeent (aka It's Not Anything Exactly Enterprises, aka Laura C. Hewitt) presses old 1s and 0s from typewriters into her ceramics to create a cool line of binary mugs, bowls, and plates. Read the rest

Sculptor Johnson Tsang (previously) has a cool new series of ceramic busts titled the Open Mind Series. Each one depicts a different way one's mind can be expanded. Read the rest

Tomomi Kamoshita uses kintsugi to fuse ceramic shards recovered from the sea into beautiful chopstick rests. This handiwork is part of a series called "Gift From The Waves." Read the rest

Cephalopods and ceramics fuse in Keiko Masumoto's whimsical updates of traditional Chinese ceramic forms. Read the rest

Jon Almeda makes impossibly small hand-thrown ceramics in a series called Pots in Different Spots. Below are some finished works: Read the rest

At a pottery fair in Pittsburgh, I ran into Kimberlyn Bloise, who makes handsome musical instruments that are also mugs, vases and pendants. They sound and look wonderful, and have the strange quality of something both charming and haunting, like remnants of a vanished culture. You can order them from her online shop.

I put a lot of testing into my instruments, but none of them plays a full scale, and none are traditionally tuned. The clay changes so much from when I begin to working with it to when I have the finished product. It shrinks and expands, and the pitches change along with it. What I have been able to do is figure out where to place the holes in relation to the size of the resonating chamber (the hollow handle) so that the notes all sound good together on each individual piece. The flute mugs all play parts of a blues scale! Could I figure out traditional tuning on all of them? Probably. But it would take so much planning and effort, and my prices would have to reflect that. I'm sure you've noticed that "real" instruments are quite expensive, and I don't want to make mine that pricey! Plus, I don't intend for anyone to play the flute handle in any professional capacity, so I don't sweat it too much.

Here's a flute hidden in a mug handle:

The large horn vase:

Here is the "complaining husky" horn vase:

And the bouncy udu:

Read the rest

Barcelona-based sculptor Xavier Mañosa created Skate Fails, a series of ceramic sculptures that look like Dali-esque melted skateboards. Read the rest

In the entry of Prince's home-turned-museum, visitors walk past a 3D-printed ceramic replica of the building they just entered. What some may not realize is that the scale replica is in fact an urn containing Prince's cremains. Read the rest

Freddie Mercury's childhood home in London will now have a blue plaque, the UK's acknowledgement of a significant historical person or place. This endearing film chronicles how it was made. Read the rest

Antiques Roadshow appraised this "bizarre and wonderful" ceramic jug from the late-19th/early-20th century at $50,000. Turns out, they were mistaken. A woman named Betsy Soule crafted the mug in high school in the 1970s. Soule's friend recognized the piece on TV and alerted her.

"As far as its age is concerned, I was fooled, as were some of my colleagues," said Antiques Roadshow's Stephen L. Fletcher in an update. "The techniques of making pottery, in many ways, haven’t changed for centuries…Still, not bad for a high schooler in Oregon.”

The current owner paid $300 for the object at an estate sale.

“I hated it when it was $30,000 to $50,000, because who wants $30,000 to $50,000 lying around their house?" he told the Bend Bulletin. "Now, it’s on my table, and I love it.”

Read the rest

Mr.Romance's lovely video of master artisans creating ceramics is a super-chill look at the beautiful techniques being practiced in the South Korean city of Icheon. Read the rest