Ann Linnemann, Ceramic Designer, Artist and Potter
If you’re anything like me every so often you’ll come across a designer or artist who seems to create work that’s near enough perfect. It doesn’t happen all that often but when it does every photo you view just seems to hit home, and when I bring it across here to showcase it’s impossible to pick up a small selection of imagery to sum up their portfolio. This happened to me earlier when I viewed Ann Linnemann’s work from Denmark, she’s a ceramic designer, artist and potter who produces both hand-thrown functional ware and sculptural form.
Ann was educated at Denmark’s Design School in Copenhagen and also worked at H.A. KÄHLER for a number of years, the Kähler workshop has quite a strong history in ceramics and dates all the way back to 1839. Here creatives would be very artistic and could let their imaginations run loose, experimenting with new ceramics techniques. As I suspected Linnemann has also travelled a lot in her life time, having studio residencies in Japan, Canada, USA, Australia, China, Egypt, South America and Europe. I can definitely see a Japanese influence in her work, I think this merges nicely with her Scandinavian background and brings out all the quirky elements in the surface. I’m also an admirer of the techniques that she’s been experimenting with and I’ve tried to pull a few photographs up showcasing this, one in-particular that’s second from bottom shows how wood firing the pots has an effect on the outside surface. It creates different colours and textures in the process, on one side you’ve got a perfect porcelain pot then the next two are variants once wood fired. I find this really fascinating.
Moving through the collection of photos we’ve got a fantastic plate shown above which holds a pair of chopsticks as a rest on the side, this is an ingenius bit of design and would be perfect for sushi of some sort. I’m also really fond of the water pouring pot below with the handle made out of thin strips of wood, this is also very innovative and is bordering on sculptural. Overall I hope you enjoy what I’ve put together, it’s been extremely tough to pick out my favourite objects because they’re all so good but you can see more from Ann Linnemann on her website via the link below. Have fun exploring!