#victorian-ceramics

#victorian-ceramics

Throughout its history, Spain has been shaped by a wide range of cultures and civilizations, including Muslim, Phoenician, Roman, Greek, Carthaginian, and Visigothic influences, which are reflected in its architecture and design.

The new webpage, entitled 'How have objects come to be in the V&A?', points out that for some objects, their journeys have involved known histories of violence, coercion or injustice, while for others there remains uncertainty over exactly how they came to be here.

Craft is often defined as skill in making things by hand, but this interpretation is being challenged by AI. Craft transcends physical interaction; historical figures like Mozart and Beethoven exemplify mastery without traditional methods.

A Chinese silver-gilt tea service once leapt from a €50,000 estimate to more than €200,000 when auctioned by Sotheby's Amsterdam in 2011.

The exhibition traces Armitage's long career from her earliest linocuts to recent work, bringing together more than 40 prints, objects, and archival materials.

The Shakers embraced the concept of radical simplicity in everyday life, as well as mandatory celibacy, pacifism, and gender equality, which continue to resonate today.

It's not a house of outstanding art, being a self-taught carver whose skills evidently advanced over the years, as you can see the evolution from fairly rough carving on the stairs to the very skilled work in the living room. He also created the paintings on the walls - talented chap - but never finished the carving in the living room, as his time finally ran out.

Glass demands immediacy. Working at temperatures above 2,000°F leaves little room for overthinking, so the process becomes a kind of live dialogue between material, colour and chance. That same immediacy informs what I'm drawn to as a collector: works that carry a decisive gesture, a tactile presence, and the feeling that they could only exist in one form.

From unassuming hunks of Carrara marble and limestone, Matthew Simmonds carves realistic, miniature gothic cathedral arches, stairwells, and colonnades. Often based on architectural details of real places, such as cities around Tuscany and Germany's Bamberg Cathedral, the sculptures portray intimate details of corners, vaulted ceilings, arcades, and stairwells that can sometimes be peeked through additional apertures.

A new campaign is aiming to collect 50 objects that sum up Englishness in an effort to move the conversation away from reductive arguments over whether to hang a St George's flag or not. Supported by the Green party politician Caroline Lucas, the musician and campaigner Billy Bragg, and Kojo Koram, a law professor, the A Very English Chat campaign hopes to tackle England's growing social divisions and political polarisation.

If you open your kitchen cabinets and want to run away screaming from the tumbling and entropic heap of half-used packages - and you're starting to consider dropping a whole paycheck at The Container Store to finally fix your life (for real this time) - Wait! Let us share with you a far cheaper and more whimsical solution: vintage tea tins.

An excavation in central London has uncovered the remains of a boys school complete with artifacts from the students' schoolwork and their playtime. The objects include a slate tablet used as an erasable notebook to practice handwriting, a slate pencil and several ceramic alleys marbles made of decorated white ceramic from the Victorian era. Artifacts related to children's lives are less frequently found than ones relating to adults, so these objects give us a special glimpse into the lives of schoolboys.

When was the last time you saw an ashtray filled with stubbed-out Marlboros at a friend's apartment? At a restaurant? For some of us, the answer may very well be "never." Maybe that's the charm of the International Museum of Dinnerware Design's new exhibition on ashtrays - invoking an era before health codes and Mayor Bloomberg. Or reaching back even further, when you might see a Similac-branded ashtray in the office of your OB/GYN.

Kulhads, also known as terracotta mud cups, once defined the everyday ritual of tea at railway stations across India. Used briefly and discarded soon after, they accumulated along tracks and coastlines, leaving a quiet record of consumption. For this pavilion, more than 18,000 of these cups were gathered from local communities in Dharavi and reused as a building material with structural purpose.