Peter Speliopoulos is a ceramicist who has collaborated with designer Mark Cunningham on textural vessels for interior projects. Together, they have released a new series of table lamps called the Archaeos series which are made of hand-thrown stoneware with crackled glazes that are designed to look like antiquities. Learn more about Peter and Mark’s collaboration in today’s Maker Monday.
Part of the Archaeos series, this lamp features textured stoneware fixtures with a unique aubergine crackle glaze.
Andrew Joseph: Describe your design style as if you were explaining it to someone who cannot see.
Peter Speliopoulos: My design style, whether it be my handmade ceramics, home objects or fashion, are always about materiality— I love surfaces that beg to be touched! I create pieces to provoke the senses, guided by principles of tactility and organic form. Run your fingers along a mysterious skin and discover something sensual and provocative, that recalls a secret history…
AJ: If you weren’t a designer, you’d be a ….?
PS: An anthropologist, because I love the study of human behaviors and cultures— I do a lot of research for my work and I get lost in this pursuit. I would have loved formal studies in sociocultural anthropology.
AJ: What’s your favorite cocktail?
PS: A rye Manhattan on the rocks, served in an antique Moser crystal glass on one of my handmade leather coasters!
Forms based in antiquity, with modern cracked and glazed surfaces of eroded matte and shine, these vessels feel as if they have been excavated from land and sea.
AJ: Style (or design) icon?
PS: Mariano Fortuny. The man and his works— fashion designer, scientist, innovator of fabrics, artist and set designer… he is the great multidisciplinary artist and that inspired me always, and I love absolutely everything he created— he defined a modern way of life influenced by ancient history and multicultural inspirations, he created “style!” And Luchino Visconti, the great Italian Director whose understanding of style and human behavior, and society, are a constant fascination and revelation!
AJ: A book that everyone should read?
PS: The Origins of Totalitarianism, by Hannah Arendt. I read it over twenty years ago, and recently reread it— well, it resonates big time! The history is profound and shocking!
The entirety of the Archaeos series, hand thrown by the artist, are traced by finger marks conveying a soul and glazed with brushstrokes, the passing of time.
AJ: Which room in the house do you find yourself working from the most? Why? How does this inform your thoughts about architecture?
PS: As an adolescent, I used to design houses and draw plans on the kitchen table— I needed the physical space to roll out big paper! And I still find the kitchen and the kitchen table the nucleus of the house— I do everything there, draw, design, correspond, plan… perhaps it has to do with the idea of the kitchen already established as a center of creation— the making of delicious meals! Or, the fact that I am always thinking and pondering, form and function and feeling. Spaces need to be able to be transformed, flexible, as the sun rotates around a space itself!
AJ: Where is the first place you want to travel now that everything is opening up?
PS: Japan! Although I have been there maybe eleven times, it has been more than a decade since my last visit. It is the most aesthetic set of experiences I have ever had— everything is about style, embracing history’s past and the super modern future. Every detail is perfection, of gardens and objects and fabrics and ceramics and food and presentation and fashion, blows the mind!
About the Maker | Ceramicist Peter Speliopoulos has been a long-time collaborator of Mark Cunningham’s, turning out textural vessels for the designer’s interiors projects in his upstate New York studio. Now Cunningham’s Marked NY portfolio of furniture, lighting, and found objects expands with the Archaeos series: Six table lamps thoughtfully crafted by Speliopoulos that star hand-thrown stoneware bases. The dramatic forms, which evoke antiquities unearthed from land and sea, are sheathed in crackled glazes that suggest organic movement and the passage of time.
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