"I'm a studio potter, we're a down-to-earth lot," said New Zealand artist Rick Rudd yesterday at the opening of his exhibition in Page One's Taipei 101 store in the Xinyi district.
"We're not really in the same class as artists like Hans Coper and Lucie Rie. They're the gods of European potters. Bernard Leach, I suppose, covered the Japanese and Asian themes. I guess I see myself in the European tradition," Rudd said, though he is from the Asia-Pacific region.
PHOTO COURTESY OF PAGE ONE
Originally from Great Yarmouth in England, Rudd was a fine-arts student before getting his hands on clay for the first time at the age of 19. It was love at first feel.
PHOTO: JULES QUARTLY, TAIPEI TIMES
"Once I touched clay that was it, I couldn't live without it. It's so malleable. It has its difficulties but that suggests solutions. It's such a lovely material to work with, sometimes soft, it hardens up like chocolate and can be refined."
Rudd's ceramics tutor at college gave him his first insights into the craft and then came the next life-altering decision, to check out New Zealand.
"It was a good move," he said, explaining that the country was a fine place for potters at the time. "There was a pot shop on every corner and pottery was popular and would sell."
For the past 31 years Rudd has developed his craft in his adopted country, moving on from the boxes he first crafted out of clay, where three-dimensional heads (usually of zoo animals such as gorillas) morph from the flat
surfaces.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Rudd started producing plaques featuring matinee idols like Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers and Marilyn Monroe. This was his "showbiz era," when he was invited to Hollywood and produced a radio talk show.
In the mid-1980s Rudd returned to modeling primate heads, before moving onto sculpting out male and female torsos that were "trapped" or formed from rising columns of clay.
In my view, however, some of these efforts seem subsidiary to the main body of his work that began with simple bowls and developed into plates, teapots and aesthetically pleasing shapes that have no utilitarian function whatsoever.
These form the main collection of items that are on show at Page One and which are also on sale, from under NT$30,000 to around NT$70,000.
Rudd has been producing these more conceptual pieces since 1969, but they have steadily evolved and become sublime in the process. The trademark curves in his works, for instance, later became mobius twists after he thought to himself, "What if a spiral met up with itself?"
"These shapes evolve. When I start a piece, it's in my head, there's no drawing at all, just a gradual evolution of form," he said.
And this is the most appealing element of Rudd's work, which has been produced largely following the modified raku technique -- removing red-hot pots from the kiln and smoking them in sawdust to get a dark, earthen look, that has become a signature mark of his wares.
In addition he has used various glazes, some of which crack and separate into globules and fissures, again giving the finished product a natural feel. Other innovations include "drilled holes," contrasting under-glaze colorations and bold splashes of primary colors.
Rudd does not label his wares, preferring instead for the viewer to provide a meaning for the work. He is keener on discovering the possibilities of form rather than finding inspiration from nature.
Rudd has used the line himself and it is apt: True to form rather than nature. It is this focus that makes him not just a studio potter, but a ceramicist of note.
Taiwanese chip-making giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) plans to invest a whopping US$100 billion in the US, after US President Donald Trump threatened to slap tariffs on overseas-made chips. TSMC is the world’s biggest maker of the critical technology that has become the lifeblood of the global economy. This week’s announcement takes the total amount TSMC has pledged to invest in the US to US$165 billion, which the company says is the “largest single foreign direct investment in US history.” It follows Trump’s accusations that Taiwan stole the US chip industry and his threats to impose tariffs of up to 100 percent
From censoring “poisonous books” to banning “poisonous languages,” the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) tried hard to stamp out anything that might conflict with its agenda during its almost 40 years of martial law. To mark 228 Peace Memorial Day, which commemorates the anti-government uprising in 1947, which was violently suppressed, I visited two exhibitions detailing censorship in Taiwan: “Silenced Pages” (禁書時代) at the National 228 Memorial Museum and “Mandarin Monopoly?!” (請說國語) at the National Human Rights Museum. In both cases, the authorities framed their targets as “evils that would threaten social mores, national stability and their anti-communist cause, justifying their actions
In the run-up to World War II, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, began to fear that Hitler would launch a war Germany could not win. Deeply disappointed by the sell-out of the Munich Agreement in 1938, Canaris conducted several clandestine operations that were aimed at getting the UK to wake up, invest in defense and actively support the nations Hitler planned to invade. For example, the “Dutch war scare” of January 1939 saw fake intelligence leaked to the British that suggested that Germany was planning to invade the Netherlands in February and acquire airfields
The launch of DeepSeek-R1 AI by Hangzhou-based High-Flyer and subsequent impact reveals a lot about the state of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) today, both good and bad. It touches on the state of Chinese technology, innovation, intellectual property theft, sanctions busting smuggling, propaganda, geopolitics and as with everything in China, the power politics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). PLEASING XI JINPING DeepSeek’s creation is almost certainly no accident. In 2015 CCP Secretary General Xi Jinping (習近平) launched his Made in China 2025 program intended to move China away from low-end manufacturing into an innovative technological powerhouse, with Artificial Intelligence
RSS