York Museums Trust

< Back to Blog

CoCA on the Road – Rachel Wade

Staff members from the Art Curatorial and Marketing & Communications teams at York Museums Trust recently attended two ceramics fairs to promote the new Centre of Ceramic Art (CoCA) at York Art Gallery, which will re-open on 1 August 2015.

Communications Assistant Rachel Wade recalls her weekend away with colleagues Helen Walsh (Curator of Ceramics) and Lauren Masterman (Marketing & Communications Assistant) at the International Ceramics Festival 2015.

On 3 July 2015, I travelled to Aberystwyth with my colleagues Helen and Lauren. Armed with leaflets, a pop-up banner and two ceramics, we were on a mission to encourage the attendees of the International Ceramics Festival 2015 to visit CoCA when it reopens next month.

It was the ideal place to promote our new Centre of Ceramic Art at York Art Gallery – the festival was full of enthusiastic fans whose eyes lit up when they saw our stall over the weekend, largely thanks to the Hans Coper and Lucie Rie pots we had on display.

The festival featured talks and demonstrations by current ceramic artists, including Christie Brown. York Museums Trust has recently purchased two of Brown’s extraordinary ceramic elves for CoCA (pictured below) – it was fantastic to meet the artist who had made them.

It was also a good opportunity to learn about the future of ceramics. I was especially inspired by Jonathan Keep, who makes vases using 3D printing techniques. This technology is something our Digital Team at York Museums Trust are looking into too.

There were many highlights to the weekend – meeting so many friendly people, seeing the giant robot kiln, and watching pots being ‘thrown’ – but my personal favourite moment was strolling along the seafront on the Sunday evening.

Find out more about the International Ceramics Festival on their website here. Read about CoCA at York Art Gallery on our website here.