RBS

RBS

“We believe craft skills and knowledge enrich and uplift us as individuals”

Art Acumen curated a ceramic collection for RBS’s client floor in their London head quarters, featuring established and up and coming ceramic artists.

Takeshi Yasuda, a ceramic heavyweight was born in Tokyo in 1943, moving to the UK in 1973. He taught at various art schools and universities across the United Kingdom before receiving an honorary degree from Bath University. His work is thrown and has a tactile quality that retains the soft malleable nature of the clay and is a fresh interpretation of creamware. His work has sensitivity unique to Oriental ceramics, and Yasuda draws on this to produce pieces that are not just concerned with design or functionality but with the way a pot can generate and be part of ritual. His palette is puritan in colour and the fluid shapes are decorated with softly dented surfaces and occasional slip trailing which offers unlimited tactile sensation. It is the contrast of control and ease, casual and formal, which makes Yasuda’s work so appealing.

Paraskeva’s multidisciplinary conceptual practice comprises stand-alone pieces, installation, film and tableware, collectively defined by a distinct language. Underpinned by a rigorous and intuitive approach, iterations of thrown and altered porcelain vessels are created by reduction fired atmospheric changes; through ‘a kiln, which is a well-insulated box, dome or cylinder that saves and contains heat – without a kiln pottery has no heart’.* The intention is to explore material possibilities. Often pieces exist with a duality, a glaze is applied inside the object and left unglazed on the outer shell. A poetic fragility is at play, making reference to our internal and external worlds. By throwing, altering, breaking and re-joining the sculptural form, Paraskeva provides shape to the vulnerability and resilient strength that inhabit us.

In part, the work is an emotional release of experiences, giving voice to the unspoken word, leaving indelible marks on the visceral porcelain vessels. Art works are imbued with an elegiac sensibility expressing sorrow, especially associated to irreparable loss, as well as interpreting political issues from a female perspective.