Simon Leach’s Pottery Handbook stands as both a technical manual and a philosophical meditation on craft. Descended from one of Britain’s most celebrated lineages of studio potters—his grandfather Bernard Leach being the seminal figure in the Anglo-Japanese pottery tradition—Simon Leach bridges tradition and contemporaneity with rare grace. His handbook is not merely an instructional text … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Pottery Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide to Throwing Beautiful, Functional Pots by Simon Leach
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 500 Knives: Celebrating Traditional & Innovative Designs, Edited by Marthe Le van
Marthe Le Van’s 500 Knives is at once a catalogue of craft and a meditation on form. Like other volumes in the “500” series, it trusts the visual authority of objects to make an argument: that knives—tools born of necessity—have been consistently shaped by cultural priorities, technological change, and aesthetic impulse. The book’s pleasures are … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 500 Knives: Celebrating Traditional & Innovative Designs, Edited by Marthe Le van
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Masters: Porcelain: Major Works by Leading Ceramists by Lark Press
Porcelain is the element of modern ceramics that most insistently asks to be read: thin as a page, luminous as lamp-glass, it carries with it histories of trade, empire, ritual and domestic intimacy. Masters: Porcelain is, at its best, a sustained act of close-looking — not a how-to manual but a catalogue raisonné of presence. … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Masters: Porcelain: Major Works by Leading Ceramists by Lark Press
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 400 Polymer Clay Designs: A Collection of Dynamic & Colourful Work by Lark Press
At first glance this is a book that does exactly what its title promises: it assembles—visually, insistently—four hundred discrete answers to a single set of questions about colour, form and surface. But read as a sculptural essay rather than merely a compendium, 400 Polymer Clay Designs offers a fuller argument about what a low-cost, thermoplastic … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 400 Polymer Clay Designs: A Collection of Dynamic & Colourful Work by Lark Press
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Penland Book of Ceramics: Masterclasses in Ceramic Techniques by Lark Press
The Penland Book of Ceramics is less a manual than a curated conversation: a communal atlas of gesture, material, and the apprentice's slow apprenticeship into the logic of clay. Brought together under the auspices of a school whose name has become shorthand for intensive craft pedagogy, this volume reads like a series of masterclasses transcribed … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Penland Book of Ceramics: Masterclasses in Ceramic Techniques by Lark Press
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Japanese Wood-Fired Ceramics by Marc Lancet
Marc Lancet’s Japanese Wood-Fired Ceramics reads less like a technical manual and more like a close, sustained meditation on a living craft. The book invites the reader into the humid, smoky hinterlands of Japanese kiln culture — into the pungent vocabulary of ash, flame, and clay — and does so with a critic’s attention to … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Japanese Wood-Fired Ceramics by Marc Lancet
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Lowlife Paradise: The Works of Glenn Barr by La Luz de Jesus & Last Gasp
Lowlife Paradise: The Works of Glenn Barr arrives, for readers and viewers alike, as more than a catalogue raisonné or a retrospective: it is a focused attempt to translate a restless, pictorial imagination into the language of the book. Glenn Barr’s work—at once cartoonish and baroque, playful and implacably strange—resists tidy taxonomies; this volume, by … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Lowlife Paradise: The Works of Glenn Barr by La Luz de Jesus & Last Gasp
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Bottomless Cocktail: The Art of Shag by La Luz de Jesus & Last Gasp
Bottomless Cocktail: The Art of Shag stages Josh Agle’s work as more than a sequence of retro postcards; it presents a sustained aesthetic argument about pleasure, style, and the uneasy seductions of American postwar fantasy. La Luz de Jesus and Last Gasp have collected images that at first glance read as playful pastiche — bright … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Bottomless Cocktail: The Art of Shag by La Luz de Jesus & Last Gasp
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Glenn Barr’s Haunted Paradise by La Luz de Jesus & Last Gasp
Glenn Barr’s Haunted Paradise reads like a visual novella: a tightly edited, obsessively staged universe in which mid-century glamour and urban rot coexist, and where the human figure—often a femme fatale, a weary vixen, or a mechanized other—functions less as subject than as cultural index. The book, co-published by La Luz de Jesus and Last … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Glenn Barr’s Haunted Paradise by La Luz de Jesus & Last Gasp
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Matisse, Painter and Sculptor by Dorothy Kosinski
Dorothy Kosinski’s Matisse, Painter and Sculptor reads like a curator’s close-reading: richly attentive to objects, attentive to provenance and process, and driven by a desire to show how a single artist sustained two apparently distinct practices across a long career. Kosinski’s central move — to treat Matisse’s painting and sculpture not as separate chapters of a life … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Matisse, Painter and Sculptor by Dorothy Kosinski
The New Renaissance Mindset 