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 is an ongoing body of ceramic and archival work developed through the materials of an unfinished excavation. The objects—vessels, implements, fragments—do not belong to a single period or belief system, and resist stable historical placement. Their forms borrow from multiple traditions without resolving into one.
The project works from a set of contradictory records describing a burial site that could not be completed. Accounts disagree on the structure of the chambers, the classification of the objects, and the status of the central figure. Later interventions focus less on interpretation than on stabilization and containment.
Rather than reconstructing a coherent narrative, the work releases these materials without resolution. What emerges is not a tomb in any conventional sense, but a collection of objects and documents organized around a refusal: to lie down, to conclude, to behave as evidence should.
Exhibition planned for 2028. Participatory opportunities from 2026.