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The Life and Work of John ffrench, Irish Ceramic Artist (1928-2010)
Peter Lamb
Gandon Editions, Kinsale, 2017
pp 336 fully illustrated h/b
€25.00 ISBN 978-1-910140-08-6
Eleanor Flegg

The patchy mosaic of Irish ceramic history has many missing parts. Sometimes this is because there wasn’t a lot going on. More often it’s for lack of published research. If a student went searching, for example, for material on John ffrench’s sojourn at Arklow Studio Pottery they’d be left scratching their heads. All the more welcome, then, when someone steps in to fill the gap. Peter Lamb’s The Life and Work of John ffrench, Irish Ceramic Artist (1928-2010) fills several.

This is a thorough study, a comprehensive artistic biography, approached from the perspective of a collector and a connoisseur. It will be of interest to those who love John ffrench’s work, but also to those in search of a broader scope on Irish ceramic history of the period.

John ffrench was a ceramic artist before it was even known that such a thing as ceramic art existed and his work did certainly not belong to the Leachian school that came to dominate these islands. He was eclectic in his influences, extraordinary in his use of colour, prolific, and playful in design. Most of his influences were not Irish. As a young man, John ffrench travelled and worked in Italy, Iceland and India. Many of his colours and forms took shape in these early years and persisted in a body of work that, although it evolved, had an extraordinary consistency. John ffrench’s work was radically different to anything else made in the country at the time. For this reason, it’s easy to think of ffrench as an anomaly; a rare and precious one-off. Lamb’s book establishes a context for his work, both in the early years when he worked with Peter Brennan in Kilkenny (the divergence of their work became more obvious after the 1950s), and in the seven years that he worked at Arklow Studio Pottery in the 1960s. John ffrench’s work, and that of his apprentices at the pottery, was bought, sold, exhibited and otherwise consumed in Ireland. It was never mainstream, but neither was it niche.

Many of his colours and forms took shape in these early years and persisted in a body of work that, although it evolved, had an extraordinary consistency

Beautifully illustrated with the lavish use of colour that ffrench’s work demands, Lamb’s book reveals more about the artists’ work than the man behind it. Possibly, John ffrench was a very private man. If so, this is reflected in the writing, which follows a factual biographical outline but does not venture into interiority. The reader is left with a detailed awareness of his work, its influences and contexts, but John ffrench himself remains an enigma.
Eleanor Flegg
A ceramic is any of the various hard, brittle, heat-resistant and corrosion-resistant materials made by shaping and then firing an inorganic, nonmetallic material, such as clay, at a high temperature. [1][2] Common examples are earthenware, porcelain, and brick.










Short timeline of ceramic in different styles
The earliest ceramics made by humans were pottery objects (pots or vessels) or figurines made from clay, either by itself or mixed with other materials like silica, hardened and sintered in fire. Later, ceramics were glazed and fired to create smooth, colored surfaces, decreasing porosity through the use of glassy, amorphous ceramic coatings on top of the crystalline ceramic substrates.[3] Ceramics now include domestic, industrial and building products, as well as a wide ranic materials were developed for use in advanced ceramic engineering, such as in semiconductors.

The word "ceramic" comes from the Greek word κεραμικός (keramikos), "of pottery" or "for pottery",from κέραμος (keramos), "potter's clay, tile, pottery". The earliest known mention of the root "ceram-" is the Mycenaean Greek ke-ra-me-we, workers of ceramic written in Linear B syllabic script. The word ceramic can be used as an adjective to describe a material, product or process, or it may be used as a noun, either singular, or more commonly, as the plural noun "ceramics".

MaterialsCeramic material is an inorganic, non-metallic oxide, nitride, or carbide material. Some elements, such as carbon or silicon, may be considered ceramics. Ceramic materials are brittle, hard, strong in compression, and weak in shearing and tension. They withstand chemical erosion that occurs in other materials subjected to acidic or caustic environments. Ceramics generally can withstand very high temperatures, ranging from 1,000 °C to 1,600 °C (1,800 °F to 3,000 °F).

The crystallinity of ceramic materials varies widely. Most often, fired ceramics are either vitrified or semi-vitrified as is the case with earthenware, stoneware, and porcelain. Varying crystallinity and electron composition in the ionic and covalent bonds cause most ceramic materials to be good thermal and electrical insulators (researched in ceramic engineering).