Established in 1986, the Centro de Formação Profissional para o Artesanato e Património (CEARTE), is a vocational training centre in the craft sector, developing training projects all over Portugal, supporting creativity, innovation, skills and talent development. Specialised training is offered in an array of crafts including ceramics, textiles, wood, paper, metal, glass and basketry, respecting and upholding time-honoured techniques and heritage skills. Putting in place a structure which promotes craftsmanship and the importance of human skills hopes to foster future careers in the world of craft and provide the skills and savoir-faire for students to forge a career as professional artisans.
Anchored in CEARTE’s mission as a school, along with the spirit of the European Year of Skills and focused on the long Portuguese ceramic tradition, we wanted to bring to Révélations, a significant show of what is best done in ceramics, at the intersection of design with the mastery of craftsmanship, exhibiting a wide range of techniques and materials.
Mestria - Portuguese craftsmanship
Ceramic - matter, fire and the master
Mestria stages on the Banquet of Révélations the excellence of the crafts of Portugal by a set of creations resulting from precise and sensitive gestures, stories of men, forms and materials. This selection questions the current practices of ceramics in Portugal, bridges between the know-how of yesterday and the messages of tomorrow. Deeply rooted in tradition, these seven ceramic workshops invent tomorrow's forms on a daily basis. Anabela Camelo sculpts the water, sand and light of the coast and the Atlantic Ocean and produces ceramics of great delicacy. Sara Guerreiro's monochromatic porcelains evoke revered, hybrid and organic architectures, while the colors and materials of Anna Westerlund's sculptures shout their joy of being in the world. Both very composed and expressive, her festive and joyful ceramics borrow signs and motifs from different cultures of the world and claim to be made in Portugal and universal. Xana Monteiro invokes silence and contemplation in her oblong, highly sculptural works. Essentially black, her works in stoneware call out to the viewer with minute details, whether they are small excrescences emerging from a perfect and sensual line or a subtle contrast between shine and mattness. In addition to these four artistic productions, three workshops contribute to renewing the production of traditional Portuguese objects, in particular the famous azulejos, glazed ceramic tiles that are inseparable from the country's cities and architecture. Thus, the human-sized factories of Azulejos de Azeitão and Sá Nogueira Azulejaria produce custom-made and contemporary tiles, while the New Terracotta collective hijacks and reinvigorates the woven ceramic basket, so dear to Portuguese families.
