Peter Olson

Peter Olson has for the last six years harmonized photography and ceramics, two mediums that have forced their way into fine art. As bands of imagery spin around the thrown and assembled ceramic garnitures, there is a feeling that time is passing, history is revealing itself, a story is being told. There is mystery as the story itself is unclear. Olson is a trained professional photographer but when making art moonlights as a street photographer, informed by daily life and cultural and religious objects. He is the fields most inventive and inspired master of fired decals (a 17th century innovation) infusing them with the passion for his subjects and magical, kinetic banding.

Peter Olson is a Philadelphia-based photographer and a self taught ceramicist who makes pieces using an innovative hybrid process. He transfers ink from photographic prints onto the surface of a wheel-thrown pot, and when the clay is fired in the kiln, the iron oxide in the ink leaves a permanent image behind, baked in. Olson’s works generally follow forms from Classical and pre-modern European art history, and his pursuit of ceramics as an art medium grew out of visits he made to various museums. The photographs he imprints on his ceramics are all taken by him—“There’s nothing on them that hasn’t gone through my camera,” he says. The photo-illustrations wrap all the way around the ceramics, covering the entire surface (including the interiors), so that the imagery cannot all be appreciated at once. For this reason Olson calls his pieces “cylindrical worlds.”

​[Source: Edited from Artist's website - https://www.peterolson.me/about]