Welcome and bienvenue to atelier tushu, home of things created by Peter Shoemaker from air, wind, earth, and fire, which if we are to believe the pre-Socratics, pretty much covers it all.

Current work

At the moment I’m going down the flaming, cone 06 rabbit hole of ceramics, in particular those pit- and raku-fired. I’m exploring both hand-built and wheel-thrown.

I’m also working on a paper and fibre project loosely modelled on the Japanese form of boro, where patchwork becomes something else all together.

Influences and approach

All of my work strives to find a balance between the glories of nature and my particular aesthetic sensibilities, as highly-inflected as they are by the baroque, my training as a zen buddhist monastic, a lifetime of collecting, and a probably entirely anachronistic pursuit of imperfect beauty.

I’ve been particularly influenced by the neolithic and its incomprehensible productions; the calligraphy and painting from the Muromachi through the Edo periods in Japan; the poetry of the Tang dynasty in China, that later of Busan, Ryokan, and Ikkyu in Japan, and even later that of Jim Harrison and Ada Limón in the US; the pre-cruciform churches of Anglo-Saxon England; the interior excesses of the late Renaissance and immediately afterwards; the shadows of Junichirō Tanizaki and Caravaggio; the transcendence of Bach, Mozart, Satie, and Chopin (and more than a little Wagner); the polychromic wordshards of Borges, and an ever-expanding ecology of extraordinarily creative and inspired ceramicists, musicians, architects, sculptors, painters, poets, and writers that make the contemporary such an interesting and exciting place within which to live.

I’m engaged here and certainly perhaps more so elsewhere with the tensions between carbon and silicon—humans and machines—and available strategies for making it work. A recent piece (in French) explores my ideas on the necessity of respite, a concern that underlies much of my work.

Here’s some recent stuff going on:

Chit-chat, exclamations of horror or happiness, or anything else can go here: peter@ateliertushu.fr.