Learn How to Pixelate Your Pottery with Shane Weaver

Often in ceramics we see potters draw imagery from flora and fauna or the abstract and non-representational to decorate their surfaces. Shane Weaver’s functional wares stand out because of his use of iconic 80’s-90’s video game imagery. He decorates his work by pairing digital and analogue, executing his pixelated surfaces with traditional low-fire slip techniques. Some of Weaver’s depictions are of the “health” symbol, a heart with varying degrees of red pixels making it up to indicate health levels of the player while other pots depict portraits of different characters such as the Ghosts from Pacman or icons from The Legend of Zelda.

More recently, Weaver has been experimenting with laser etching of the surface of green ceramics, achieving an even greater multi-layer, pixelated surface. His work is becoming more polished and digital all the time, looking to be nearly straight out of a video game, if only video games had handmade pottery that wasn’t only for smashing! Should Weaver allow his work to transcend the handmade?

Weaver is part of the new Canadian ceramics collective called Make and Do. Weaver received his BFA from the Ontario College of Art & Design in Toronto in 2009. He has done a residency at Medalta in Alberta and is currently a resident at Harbourfront Centre in Toronto. Go to Weaver’s Instagram, @shanejweaver to see the laser etching process in action.