Maureen Mills’s Surface Design for Ceramics reads like a compact manifesto for the small, concentrated art of ornamentation — not a polemic but a pedagogy: a careful, image-rich argument that the surface of a vessel is not mere decoration appended to a form but an active partner in meaning-making. Presented as one of the practical … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Surface Design for Ceramics by Maureen Mills
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden
Mike Mignola’s Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire reads like a found object from a ruined twentieth century: a book that is equal parts trench-mud odyssey, moral fable, and Gothic reliquary. Conceived by Mignola and written with Christopher Golden, it was published as an illustrated novel in 2007 and later expanded into … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Joe Golem and the Drowning City by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden
Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden’s Joe Golem and the Drowning City announces itself as many things at once: an illustrated novel, a pastiche of pulp detective fiction, a piece of dark folklore, and a careful exercise in atmosphere. Published as an illustrated novel in 2012, it is a collaborative hybrid in which Mignola’s visual imagination … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Joe Golem and the Drowning City by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 500 Paper Objects: New Directions in Paper Art by Gene McHugh
Gene McHugh’s 500 Paper Objects performs the deceptively ambitious work of making a single, humble material speak with the variety and insistence of a chorus. Arranged as a dense visual catalogue rather than a sustained monograph, the book stages paper not as a passive substrate but as an active agent: folded, torn, cast, burned, layered, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 500 Paper Objects: New Directions in Paper Art by Gene McHugh
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Painting and Decorating Furniture by Sheila McGraw
An attentive manual that thinks like a maker and reads like a quiet manifesto Sheila McGraw’s Painting and Decorating Furniture presents itself at first glance as a pragmatic handbook: techniques, materials, step-by-step procedures. Beneath that useful surface, however, the book stages a subtler argument about how objects participate in our lives — about the ways … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Painting and Decorating Furniture by Sheila McGraw
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Good Bones, Great Pieces: The Seven Essential Pieces That Will Carry You Through a Lifetime by Suzanne and Lauren McGrath
At once primer and manifesto, Good Bones, Great Pieces stakes a modest but ambitious claim: a home’s durability—its capacity to endure fashions, life changes and moves—depends less on trend-chasing than on a coherent set of flexible, well-chosen objects. Suzanne and Lauren McGrath, a mother–daughter design team steeped in editorial and television worlds, lay out that … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Good Bones, Great Pieces: The Seven Essential Pieces That Will Carry You Through a Lifetime by Suzanne and Lauren McGrath
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Picasso: Painter and Sculptor in Clay by Marilyn McCully
Marilyn McCully’s Picasso: Painter and Sculptor in Clay performs the double service every good exhibition catalogue must: it documents a body of work that has long been underrated in mainstream Picasso scholarship, and it supplies interpretive apparatus sufficient to make that body of work matter anew. The volume — produced to accompany the Royal Academy … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Picasso: Painter and Sculptor in Clay by Marilyn McCully
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Maker: Crafting a Unique Space by Tamara Maynes
Tamara Maynes’ The Maker: Crafting a Unique Space is at once a manifesto for tactile domesticity and a practical handbook for anyone who wants their home to read like a lived, handcrafted archive. Maynes—who writes from the vantage of a practitioner—treats making not as a hobby but as a mode of seeing: an attentiveness to … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Maker: Crafting a Unique Space by Tamara Maynes
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversations Within Our Bodies Impact our Mood, Our Choices, and Our overall Health by Emeran Mayer
Emeran Mayer’s The Mind-Gut Connection reads like an extended, lucid argument built at the crossroads of medicine, neuroscience and narrative. Its central thesis—that the brain and the gut are in ongoing, bidirectional conversation and that this dialogue shapes mood, behaviour, and health—will be familiar to readers of contemporary popular science. What Mayer achieves, however, is … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversations Within Our Bodies Impact our Mood, Our Choices, and Our overall Health by Emeran Mayer
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Sex Pots – Eroticism in Ceramics by Paul Mathieu
Paul Mathieu’s Sex Pots is a bracing, often surprising intervention in both ceramics scholarship and the wider study of erotic art. Its premise is simple and stubbornly persuasive: clay and the vessel-form have been unusually intimate companions to human sexuality across cultures and ages, and the history of ceramics is one of repeated, inventive erotic … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Sex Pots – Eroticism in Ceramics by Paul Mathieu
The New Renaissance Mindset 