Welcome and bienvenue to atelier tushu, home of things created by Peter BG Shoemaker from earth, air, fire, and water, which if we are to believe the pre-Socratics, pretty much covers it all.
Alongside vessels, bowls, and other elemental forms, the atelier undertakes longer investigations into how objects, narratives, and archives shape—and unsettle—our sense of the past and future.
Current Research Projects
Chronoliths: Between the Great Silences
Eight black stoneware objects.
Carved with a Paleolithic blade.
Marked with humanity’s oldest known symbols.
A dreamland of the real.
Exhibition planned for 2026.
Reliquaries of Ash and Air is a growing collection of ceramic works that explore what remains when the sacred has eroded. Each piece—a wounded architecture—built to protect what can no longer be kept. Fractured, wired, or pierced, these reliquaries echo the desire to preserve love, memory, or belief even as they slip away. Drawing on the language of shrines and containers, the works hover between devotion and disillusionment, their surfaces carrying the quiet trace of something once cherished, now lost. Formed from clay, ash, wire, and other materials of want, they ask: what happens when the reliquary outlives what it was made to hold?
Exhibition planned for 2027.
The Tomb of the Wayward Queen is an ongoing para-fictional body of archival and ceramic work that unfolds through the partial reconstruction of a disputed excavation. Structured around contradictory records from a 1937 Franco–Soviet mission to the Zeravshan foothills, the project moves through field notes, photographs, maps, oral testimony, and a gradually emerging artefact assemblage.
Rather than presenting a stable archaeological narrative, the work releases evidence in fragments. Chamber plans shift, objects are misclassified, and the status of the central figure remains unresolved. The ceramic works do not function as illustrations of a known past, but as material propositions within an unstable archive: forms that appear to belong to ritual, domestic, and funerary registers at once, without settling into a coherent typology.
What emerges is not a completed tomb, but a field of documents, absences, and objects under pressure—an archive whose authority begins to dissolve as the reconstruction proceeds.
Participatory opportunitiesfrom 2026available now.