Who says artists can't be entrepreneurial? The Design Trust is helping artists and makers think like designers - identifying and then finding their ideal audience. Veronica Simpson reports on the journey of one cartographically inspired ceramicist

摘要

The little globe co is the product of two years' painstaking development and refinement for ceramic artist Loraine Rutt. Built around a range of six miniature globes, inspired by the original 18th-century 'Gentleman's Novelties', it renders in exquisite porcelain relief and delicate paintwork the wonders of our planet or its lunar companion. To hold one is to feel afresh the fragility of our planet, and how precarious, troubled and yet magical is our existence on its surface. Rutt trained as a cartographer and worked at Birkbeck but quit mapping when digital tools started removing the input of eye and hand. She switched to ceramics, studying at Central Saint Martins under some of the UK's finest ceramic artists, including Richard Slee, Gillian Lowndes, Ruth Dupre and Rob Kesseler. After graduating, she won a Churchill Memorial Trust Travelling Fellowship, and journeyed across Spain, the USA and Mexico, investigating architectural ceramic styles and finding inspiration for a whole new body of work - which sold out at the resulting show. But although she has been making cartographically inspired work for more than 25 years, it is hard as an artist to keep the momentum going, and making has occasionally taken a back seat to teaching and inspired (but time consuming) house renovations.