Welcome and bienvenue to atelier tushu, home of things created by Peter BG Shoemaker from earth, air, fire, and water, which if we are to believe the pre-Socratics, pretty much covers it all.
Alongside vessels, bowls, and other elemental forms, the atelier also undertakes longer investigations into the ambiguous past and the uncertain future.
Current Research Projects
Chronoliths: Between the Great Silences
Eight black stoneware objects.
Carved with a Paleolithic blade.
Marked with humanity’s oldest known symbols.
A dreamland of the real.
Exhibition planned for 2026.
Reliquaries of Ash and Air is a growing collection of ceramic works that explore what remains when the sacred has eroded. Each piece—a wounded architecture—built to protect what can no longer be kept. Fractured, wired, or pierced, these reliquaries echo the desire to preserve love, memory, or belief even as they slip away. Drawing on the language of shrines and containers, the works hover between devotion and disillusionment, their surfaces carrying the quiet trace of something once cherished, now lost. Formed from clay, ash, wire, and other materials of want, they ask: what happens when the reliquary outlives what it was made to hold?
Exhibition planned for 2027.
The Tomb of the Wayward Queen unfolds as an imagined excavation of devotion and transgression. Its mismatched relics—ceramics, implements, votive offerings—belong to no single era or faith. Bronze Age gestures mingle with late-Roman excess, fragments whispering of a cult that may never have existed.
Part archaeological fiction, part funerary dream, the project assembles traces of a queen who refused the order of her own burial. Each object stands as evidence of a myth rewritten, a body remembered otherwise.
What emerges is less a tomb than a theatre of fragments: desire housed in clay, ritual undone and remade, history bent toward its own undoing.
Exhibition planned for 2028. Participatory opportunities from 2026.