Welcome and bienvenue to atelier tushu, the studio practice of Peter Shoemaker, an artist, writer, and researcher working with ceramics and other objects, archives, images, sounds, and the material traces through which we attempt to make sense of the world.

The work resists easy categorisation, shifting between functional and sculptural forms, speculative archaeology, ritual objects, parafictional narratives, and longer research-led investigations. Across these forms, the studio is concerned with how matter acquires meaning, how objects and images become evidence, and how accounts of the past—and projections of the future—are made, inherited, imposed, exchanged, and unsettled.

Selected Objects

  • Chronolith (detail). 2025.
  • Traces. 2025.
  • Sea Dreams. 2024.
  • Bowl. Raku. 2025.

Selected Investigations

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 Tomb of the Wayward Queen

An investigation into the nature of knowledge, archives, and the desire to know.

In 1937, a joint Franco–Soviet archaeological mission entered the Zeravshan foothills. It did not return intact.

What survives is an archive under strain: field notes that contradict one another, photographs that suggest chambers no map can hold, object inventories that shift between drafts. Later authorities attempted to stabilize the record. Their conclusions were withdrawn.

This is a reconstruction undertaken in full awareness of that failure.

The Long Surface

The Long Surface is a series of constructed cityscape photographs in which passages from ancient cuneiform law are embedded within contemporary urban environments.

These fragments appear as a sort of palimpsest in the present tense, revealing how civic questions—harm, obligation, ownership, labour, judgment, and shared responsibility—continue to jostle across time and cultures, never fully resolved, always reappearing as marks on the skin of the city.

Field Notes on Matter

Subscribe to Field Notes on Matter for occasional writing from the studio on ceramics, archives, ritual, material evidence, and the work of making.