Ceramics and tattoo imagery come together in Adam Shrewsbury’s exercise in fragility

Adam Shrewsbury, the Southeast Michigan-based tattoo artist, has found more than just people to tattoo. Inspired by traditional tattooing, stylistically and symbolically, the talismanic vernacular of tattoo imagery creates a gateway into life’s major realities for Adam: love, loss, hope, betrayal, triumph, endurance – and death. When Adam’s mother suddenly died when he was a child, the impact “cannot be overstated”. It’s what led Adam to tackling two art forms that are extremely fragile: tattooing permanent images onto skin and the careful creation of ceramics.

You’ve never seen ceramics painted in this way – ceramics is one of the world’s oldest art forms, with ancient Greek, Chinese and Nazca pottery, but here it is connected to the modern day with the endearing kitsch of tattoo imagery of the 20th century. The parodical tributes to Mickey Mouse and Felix The Cat appear, with classic references to panthers, roses and skulls. Inspired by pottery artists Michael and Magdalenda Frimkess as well as the trickster characters of tattoo iconography, Adam’s eye for the space that the two forms can share leads to pottery with true personality – ceramic vases that feel like they’ve really lived and got inked on a night out.

“To be honest I am not so concerned with the subject matter itself. I am more interested in my state of being while I am working,” says Adam. “I believe that a well made work of art resonates with the maker and will continue to do so long after it has left the studio. I am trying to achieve the impossible by crafting an object with a vibrational presence that goes beyond the surface of the thing itself.”

For Adam, to merge tattooing and ceramics is a “very natural process”. As people age, their tattoos tend to spread out – similarly with ceramics, as they are fired, the clay shrinks and the glaze spreads out like ink inside of evolving skin. Through the lens of ceramic art, Adam draws a link to how people are art themselves – how art is part of our social DNA. “Having a curiosity and a desire to see something appear where there was nothing before. To me, it is certainly a type of magic,” says Adam. “There is also perhaps an innate drive to claim one’s own body and to mark something as yours and perhaps a feeling of wanting to say, ‘I was here’. It’s ultimately a mystery to me, and one that keeps me curious.”