Book Launch & Ceramics Showcase: Agalis Manessi - Camden Art Centre
Type
Events
Format
In the Building
Date 7 Mar 2024
19:00-21:00
Price Free

Writer and ceramicist Agalis Manessi will launch her new book, accompanied by a small display of ceramics.

Of all the ceramic processes, Maiolica truly requires a painter’s touch. Combining a confident sensitivity of brushwork and a vision of what might be once the subtle blends of oxides fuse with the tin glaze in the firing, it is both a rewarding and unforgiving art form.

A Journey Painted in Clay celebrates the ceramic work of Agalis Manessi through its various forms of expression over a career spanning fifty years. Inspired by many historical and contemporary sources, her work is a fusion of her Mediterranean heritage and annual travels across Europe between Greece and London. Ideas are drawn from the experience of viewing subjects in churches, museums and galleries and observations directly from life. Animated vessels express a gentle humour that is offset by the suggestive poise of their condensed forms, camouflaged within the painted surface.

Alongside launching this title, there will be a display of the artist’s ceramics which will also be for sale.

The Artist

The Artist

Born in Corfu, Greece, and growing up before the rush of mass tourism, a place bursting with a kaleidescopic array of flora and fauna, Agalis Manessi remembers the first time she saw a potter working and in what seemed like a magical sleight of hand a pot emerged out of an amorphous lump of clay. Her father had taken her to a local pottery in Corfu town, were she grew up, run by two brothers who were deaf, their satisfaction in the creative process evident even to her six year old self.

From this early inspiration she studied at the Central School of Art under a host of influential teachers: Gordon Baldwin, Gillian Lowndes, Eileen Nisbet, Kenneth Clarke, Dan Arbeid and the painter Geoffrye Rogers.

In 1980 she set up her first studio in the basement of a house in Hackney and continued to work there up until 2016 when she moved to Kennington. She now works in another basement but is fortunate to have light filled studio in Corfu and splits her time between the two places.