Welcome and bienvenue to atelier tushu, the studio practice of Peter Shoemaker, an artist and writer working with ceramics, objects, archives, and the material traces through which histories are made.
The work moves between functional and sculptural forms, speculative archaeology, ritual objects, and longer research-led projects. Across these different forms, the studio is concerned with how matter acquires meaning, how objects become evidence, and how narratives of the past are made, inherited, and unsettled.
Selected Projects
Chronoliths: Between the Great Silences
The implacable stones of the Palaeolithic and Neolithic—
they have long haunted my thinking about matter, ideas, time.
Around them: marks, carvings, fragments.
Mute. Ambiguous. Unresolved.
A dreamland of the real.
Chronoliths takes shape in this absence.
Stones inhabiting unmoored time.
Our deepest history.
Our barely imaginable future.
The Lesser Sanctities: Six devotions for a human liturgy
The Lesser Sanctities have no canonical place in our temples. They are devotions revering the loss and emptiness that defines us: grief, love, childhood, speech, soul, and dream. Six reliquaries, six gestures, six stations in a liturgy made from everything that comes before doctrine.
The Tomb of the Wayward Queen is an ongoing para-fictional body of archival and ceramic work that unfolds through the partial reconstruction of a disputed excavation. Structured around contradictory records from a 1937 Franco–Soviet mission to the Zeravshan foothills, the project moves through field notes, photographs, maps, oral testimony, and a gradually emerging artefact assemblage.
Rather than presenting a stable archaeological narrative, the work releases evidence in fragments. Chamber plans shift, objects are misclassified, and the status of the central figure remains unresolved. The ceramic works do not function as illustrations of a known past, but as material propositions within an unstable archive: forms that appear to belong to ritual, domestic, and funerary registers at once, without settling into a coherent typology.
What emerges is not a completed tomb, but a field of documents, absences, and objects under pressure—an archive whose authority begins to dissolve as the reconstruction proceeds.
The Lesser Gods of Ordinary Ruin is a ceramic and speculative fiction project imagining a domestic cult of minor divinities: small powers invoked to survive grief, desire, shame, fatigue, secrecy, repair, and the ordinary weather of human life.
Through sculptural figures, votive vessels, altars, tablets, and ritual tools, the work gives material body to emotional necessities.
Subscribe to Field Notes on Matter for occasional writing from the studio on ceramics, archives, ritual, material evidence, and the work of making.