Please join HCCC for a cup-throwing demonstration by United by Hand artist Ehren Tool, a former marine who served in the 1991 Gulf War. Tool uses his potter’s wheel to make cups that expose the large disparity between fiction and the realities of war. For the artist, each cup represents a human life. He uses the utilitarian object’s familiar form to engage the user in a dialogue with the graphic photographs and press-molded war paraphernalia used to decorate each cup’s surface.
The cups created at this event will be incorporated into the exhibition. Many of these cups will be given out to the public at the United by Hand Memorial Day Weekend Closing Event on Saturday, May 27. Clay generously provided by the Ceramics Store, Inc.
About the Artist
Ehren Tool (Berkeley, CA) is a ceramic artist and the senior laboratory mechanician at the University of California, Berkeley’s ceramic department. He served as a Marine in the 1991 Gulf War. Tool has an MFA from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BFA from the University of Southern California. His work has been shown at the Minnesota Street Project (San Francisco, CA), the Oakland Museum of California (Oakland, CA), the Craft and Folk Art Museum (Los Angeles, CA), the Berkeley Art Center (Berkeley, CA), the Bellevue Arts Museum (Seattle, WA), and The Clay Studio (Philadelphia, PA). His work is in the permanent collections of The Smithsonian Renwick Gallery (Washington, D.C.), the Centre National des Arts Plastiques Français (Paris, France), and Arizona State University’s Ceramics Research Center (Tempe, AZ). More information at https://www.dirtycanteen.com/ehren-tool.html.
