Max Lamb

Permanent Collection’s collaboration with celebrated London-based designer, Max Lamb (b.1980), has yielded three ceramics inspired by works made during Lamb’s time at the JB Blunk Residency in Inverness, CA in 2009. Max designed these related, but subtly different, vessels following his exposure to the ceramics of artist JB Blunk (1926–2002). Before 2009, Lamb had never worked with clay, but he started by tracing the arc of Blunk’s own practice, begun in the Japanese pottery region of Bizen, Japan in 1953. When Blunk returned to California, he dug clay from the nearby hills of Nicasio—Lamb did the same, firing his works in Blunk’s kiln.

For these new pieces, Lamb used his earlier ceramics as templates, but asked Roelof Uys, studio head at the historic Leach Pottery—located in Lamb’s native Cornwall, U.K.—to execute the designs. Bernard Leach (1887–1979) founded his influential pottery in 1920 with Japanese ceramicist Shoji Hamada (1894–1978), fusing the aesthetics and manufacturing methods of East & West—a meeting of influences that was likewise a feature of Blunk’s work and, by extension, of Lamb’s.