Bernard Rooke, Totem Table Lamp.

Name: Bernard Rooke, Totem Table Lamp.
Brand: Bernard Rooke
Price: 1363.55 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

A table lamp made by the brutalist potter Bernard Rooke, born in 1938. It comes with a later light blue lamp shade, matching the blue enamel color in the lamp base. It is a sculptural piece made in the early 1960´s and made up of three ceramic elements in natural tones of terracotta and stone, with a combination of dry and glazed finishes. Unsigned, which was typical for his early works. Rooke is one of Great Britain's leading pottery artists. In his own studio, he crafted unique stoneware pieces with earthy color schemes, abstract relief decors, and brutalist expression. Rooke has exhibited his "Brutalist" ceramics both in the UK and abroad with work in many collections both public and private including the Victoria and Albert Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, Nuffield Foundation, Paisley Museum and Art Galleries, Leicester Museum, Buckinghamshire County Museum, Röhsska Museum in Sweden and the Trondheim Kunstmuseum in Norway. Rooke attended Ipswich School of Art studying painting and lithography before going on to study at Goldsmiths College of Art. It was while studying here that he decided to take up pottery. Although unfamiliar with this craft and tradition, he found that working with clay provided new opportunities for freedom of interpretation and creativity. In 1960, Rooke set up his first pottery in Forest Hill in South London along with fellow pottery artist Alan Wallwork. He was initially using mainly hand building, coiling, blocking and slabbing techniques. Progressive designs were readily accepted in London at that time, and Rooke applied his efforts to making pieces of a sculptural nature. The early pieces were mainly fashioned by hand using coils and blocks. Rooke found that whereas a work might not find a market as a piece of sculpture, if made into a lamp base it was more readily acceptable to the public. The lamp bases were, indeed, popular and have proved a mainstay until the present day. Rooke's membership of 'The Craftsman Potters' Association' enabled him to show his work in a shop in Carnaby Street in London. In 1967, both the need for a larger working space and becoming disillusioned with living in London spurred Rooke into moving out of the city and to an old mill building in Suffolk. Brutalism is a style with an emphasis on materials, textures and construction, producing highly expressive forms. Seen in the work of Le Corbusier from the late 1940s with the Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles, the term was first used by Alison Smithson in 1953 for an unexecuted project for a house in Colville Place, Soho in which she described its warehouse aesthetic of bare concrete, brick and wood “as the first exponent of the ‘new brutalism’” in England.

Creator:

Bernard Rooke (Sculptor)

Dimensions:

Height: 25.2 in (64 cm)Width: 13.78 in (35 cm)Depth: 13.78 in (35 cm)

Power Source:

Plug-in

Voltage:

220-240v

Lampshade:

Included

Style:

Brutalist (Of the Period)