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In this sixth chapter of his project A Myth of Two Souls, Vasantha Yogananthan recounts the episode of the war, which raises questions about death and reincarnation.

Afterlife is the sixth chapter of Vasantha Yogananthan’s long-term project A Myth of Two Souls inspired by the epic tale The Ramayana. Drawing inspiration from the imagery associated with this myth and its pervasiveness in everyday Indian life, Vasantha Yogananthan has retraced the legendary route from north to south India. A Myth of Two Souls is informed by the notion of a journey in time and space and offers a modern retelling of the tale.

Afterlife is centered around the bloody war between the army of Ravana and the army of Rama. As its title suggests, the chapter deals with death and reincarnation. With Rama’s cruelty finally revealed, the series can be read as a visual exploration of one man’s descent into the darkness of the soul. Although the pictures were shot in Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu over two editions of Dussehra — the Indian festival celebrating the victory of good over evil — they do not document the festivities. They focus on the trance people try to reach night after night, as if during one week they were allowed to escape their bodies to become somebody else.

Back to his studio, Yogananthan did collages by mixing several pictures together to put the viewer in a state of disorientation. The Ramayana has been continuously rewritten and reinterpreted through time, and for Yogananthan’s Afterlife has been retold by Indian writer Meena Kandasamy. Amma — the seventh and last chapter of A Myth of Two Souls — will be published next year and will mark the end of the project (2013-2021).

Here’s our very first calendar in a very limited edition of 150, with recent works by French painter Alexandra Duprez.

Listening to Clay: Conversations with Contemporary Japanese Ceramic Artists is the first book to present conversations with some of the most important living Japanese ceramic artists. Tracing the evolution of modern and contemporary craft and art in Japan, this groundbreaking volume highlights sixteen individuals whose unparalleled skill and creative brilliance have lent them an influence that far transcends national borders.

Despite forging illustrious careers and earning international recognition for their work, these sixteen artists have been little known in terms of their personal stories. Ranging in age from sixty-three to ninety-three, they embody the diverse experiences of several generations who have been active and successful from the late 1940s to the present day, a period of massive change. Now, sharing their stories for the first time in Listening to Clay, they not only describe their distinctive processes, inspirations, and relationships with clay, but together trace a seismic cultural shift through a field in which centuries-old but exclusionary potting traditions opened to new practitioners and kinds of practices.

Listening to Clay includes conversations with artists born into pottery-making families, as well as with some of the first women admitted to the ceramics department of Tokyo University of the Arts, telling a larger story about ingenuity and trailblazing that has shaped contemporary art in Japan and around the world. Each artist is represented by an entry including a brief introduction, a portrait, selected examples of their work, and an intimate interview conducted by the authors over several in-person visits from 2004 to 2019. At the core of each story is the artist’s personal relationship to clay, often described as a collaboration with the material rather than an imposing of intention.

Edition of 16 comprising a first edition book with one hand painted print by Vasantha Yogananthan (21 x 25 cm, signed and numbered on the reverse) and a chaplet, housed together in a 32 x 26 cm clamshell box, handmade by La Reliure Contemporaine (Morina Mongin).
Each box is unique and may look slightly different from the picture.

This publication accompanies the exhibition Artifices instables, Histoires de céramiques, presented at Nouveau Musée National de Monaco – Villa Sauber and curated by Cristiano Raimondi.Featuring more than two hundred pieces, the project escapes the well-trodden art historical narratives that keep ceramics at the margins of the arts, and instead pays tribute to the medium and investigates it as a heterogeneous material capable of narrating multiple histories.

Taking as its starting point the creation of the first Ceramic Art Workshop of Monaco in the second half of the nineteenth century, the book portrays some of the leading figures in the Principality’s ceramic history—the Fischers, Albert Diato, and Eugène Baudin—and creates bridges and resonances with numerous artists, among them Johan Creten, Simone Fattal, George Ohr, Ron Nagle, Pablo Picasso, and Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, some of whom may be distant in space and time, but nevertheless share deep connections and unexpected complicities.The book gathers more than a century of visions that this malleable medium has inspired, and mirrors ceramic artists in its aspiration to provoke a shift in perspective.

Edited by Cristiano RaimondiTexts by Cecilia Canziani, Valérie Da Costa, Chus Martínez, Cristiano Raimondi, and Agnès Roux.

Rinko Kawauchi captures the simplicity of intimate and shared moments, revealing her life through the tenderness and quiet unfolding of time.

A blue sky. A shimmering river. The birth of a new life. These are the first three photographs from Rinko Kawauchi’s book “As it is”. This new body of work returns to Kawauchi’s earlier photographic focus on her personal universe through family, memory and time. This book presents a succession of mundane moments and gestures ―  a spider’s web, a bowl of rice, a small hand pointing at an insect ― along with more significant ones ― her daughter’s first steps, family outings, the passing of a close relative. The personal narrative of the book is punctuated by a photograph of a kitchen window witnessing the passing of the seasons, and short texts by Kawauchi herself interspersed in the sequence. The pages navigate between the inside and the outside, always within close distance as, through her unique eye, Kawauchi effortlessly catches the fleeting beauty of the in-between moments, telling the story of an ordinary family going through life just as it is.

This book was made in close collaboration with Japanese publisher torch press.

100% organic cotton tote bag designed by Masanao Hirayama (HIMAA)

100% organic cotton tote bag designed by Masanao Hirayama (HIMAA)

Edith Heath: Philosophies is the most comprehensive resource on Edith Kiertzner Heath (1911-2005) and the history of Heath Ceramics to date, emphasizing the philosophical foundations and influences of one of the most significant creative forces in post-WWII America. Heavily illustrated, it features a foreword, preface, visual historical timeline, product and dinnerware glaze history, and thirteen chapters contributed by artists and scholars who have conducted research using the Brian and Edith Heath/Heath Ceramics Collection at the Environmental Design Archives (EDA), UC Berkeley. This publication will serve as a complement to the 2021 exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California, offering substantial and in-depth commentary on the presented themes—the environment, feminism, experimentation, architecture, politics, collaborations—while solidifying the relevance of Edith Heath’s story in contemporary life and society.

Thematically organized, Edith Heath: Philosophies emphasizes lesser-known narratives and utilizes rarely seen images. Edith Heath considered her dinnerware to be more than a collection of objects; it was a statement of good design reflecting the post-war American West Coast lifestyle. The book departs from the traditional linear narrative of the company and situates Edith Heath as an influential and under-acknowledged figure in ceramic design history. The text and rich illustrations will appeal to a diverse audience interested in post-WWII design, material culture, and California history.

This book captures the raw moment of inception behind a designer’s collection. Assemblage 6 started off with almost 300 maquettes: chairs, lamps, stools, or daybeds made of wire, cardboard, tape, and canvas, or the everyday materials to be found in Faye Toogood’s studio. But having lined up these rather crude, almost childlike maquettes, the collection, in essence, was decided. Seventeen were chosen to be scaled up to life-size works, and here we have an immersive journey through all the original maquettes and their occasional passage into the real world of furniture/sculpture, a book that plays with the sense of dissimulation evident in the final artworks, or the fact that some objects are not always what they seem at first glance.

The Man Booker–nominated author Sophie Mackintosh opens with this idea in her short story, while the book closes on an essay by the independent writer and curator Glenn Adamson, who ultimately provides context for the collection and process as a whole.

Guido De Zan was born in Milan in 1947, and in 1975 he began his research in the field of ceramics. He used stoneware and porcelain to create both sculptures and functional objects. This monograph is dedicated to his 40-year career as a ceramist, during which he sought ways to “lighten” the material and seek balance, however unstable it seemed. Comprising a rich catalogue of works divided into categories, it presents new texts by several authors, including De Zan himself. It also features a critical anthology of writings that emphasise the fundamental themes of De Zan’s research, from the relationship between art and manual labour, to his connection with Milan.

The art of ceramic restoration with lacquer and gold powder.

Kintsugi is an ancient Japanese art of restoring a ceramic object by gluing the broken ends with lacquer and then making up the scars with gold powder.

Izumi Shimura, the author, practices and teaches the art of kintsugi.

Photographs © Studio Haberfeld

This long-awaited monograph presents the breadth of JB Blunk’s practice and includes never-before-seen archival and newly commissioned photographs of jewelry, ceramics, paintings, furniture, sculpture and his hand built house. Edited by Mariah Nielson and Åbäke, the book features essays by Lucy Lippard, Glenn Adamson, Fariba Bogzaran and Louise Allison Cort.

An unexpected collection of over 100 images spanning the history of representations, Jeux de mains (sculpted, molded, photographed, or painted) is like a treasure chest of this marvelous five-fingered tool.

Most artists have, at some point, represented the universal symbol of creation which is the hand. Many of them have also chosen the hand as a recurring pattern in their work. This observation inspired Cécile Poimboeuf-Koizumi — editor and founder of Chose Commune — to gather the works that caught her attention in a book, following no thematic or chronological order. The selection was made in collaboration with Stephen Ellcock, who has made a name for himself over the past few years for bringing the art gallery directly to people with his glorious collection of images which he shares everyday on Instagram and Facebook. From Pablo Picasso to Helena Almeida, from Louise Bourgeois to Alberto Giacometti, from John Baldessari to Francesca Woodman, and comprising a multitude of treasures from the ancient ages to documents from popular imagery, Jeux de mains confronts and mixes famous, emerging and anonymous artists from a wide-range of practices. The result is a collection of more than a hundred images compiled intuitively in this book.

Note: This is a French-folded book. The pages are not meant to be cut. By gently part-opening the pages and looking inside, you will discover information about each of the artworks.

List of artists:

ALBARRÀN CABRERA — ALBIN-GUILLOT  Laure — ALMEIDA Helena —  ÁLVAREZ BRAVO Manuel —  AUBÖCK Carl — BALDESSARI John — BALLEN Roger — BARK Jared — BAUGHAN Rosa —BERNHARD Ruth — BLUMENFELD Erwin — BORREMANS Michaël — BOUCHER Pierre — BOURGEOIS Louise  — BUONAROTTI Michelangelo — CAHUN Claude — CALLE Sophie — CARAFA Giovanni — CHIEH-JEN Chen — CLARK Harold T. — CUDDON Katie — DE BLAUWER Katrien — DE MOÜY Iris — DEGAS Edgar — DIEULEFILS Pierre — DILL Lesley —DYKE William — EDGERTON Harold — GHIRRI Luigi — GIACOMETTI Alberto — GIBSON Ralph — GILL Simryn — GORDON Daniel — GUITTARD Alice — GUSTON Philip — GUÉRARD Henri Charles — HIROSHIGE Utagawa — HOLBEIN (Le Jeune) Hans — HOPPÉ Emil Otto — INGRES Jean-Auguste-Dominique — ISHIUCHI MIYAKO — ITURBIDE Graciela — JEEWON KIM Shantal — KAWAUCHI Rinko — KEITH ROACH Clementine — KERTÉSZ André — LEPPÄLÄ Anni — LOTAR Eli — L’ADMIRAL Jan — MAURER Dora — MELOTTI Fausto — MICHALS Duane — MINKINNEN Arno — MOHOLY-NAGY Lazslo — MORELLI Giovanni  — MUNARI Bruno — MUÑOZ Oscar — NADAR Félix — NESHAT Shirin — ONES Fiona — O’BRIEN John — PARADIN Claude — PESCE Gaetano — PICASSO Pablo — PINARD Guillaume — PÉTROVITCH Françoise — RAY Man — RICHTER Gerhard — ROCHAS-PÀRIS Lia — RODIN Auguste — SCHIELE Egon — SHOVLIN Jamie — STEINBERG Saul — STIEGLITZ Alfred — SUDA Issei — TARABELLA Philippe — UEMATSU Keiji — VON MENZEL Adolf Frierdrich Erd-mann — VRELANT Willem — WAESE Alice — WATSON Claire — WHITE CO H.C WILHELMUS COUWENBERG Henricus — WOODMAN Francesca — YOGANANTHAN Vasantha