All prize winners of each category will soon receive a handmade ceramic tree*, created by Constantinos Malousaris especially for Eyelands Book Awards. There are 10 tree prizes ready to ship (we keep Grand prize-trees for the award ceremony), two for each subcategory. Each one of them is unique as they are all handmade. Special Distinctions get different kind of handmade ceramics.
With Kafka’s “Art needs craft more than craft needs art” as a basic principle, I strive to find the balance between pleasure and the therapeutic quality of making, creating objects and the additional achievement of making a living and acquiring recognition through it.
Constantinos Malousaris was born in 1972 in Athens. There, he studied photolithography and graphic arts. In 1997, and along with his friend Margarita Leousi, they made the fanzine “walk in the Park”. From then until 2009, he did not stop writing texts, but did not consider it necessary to publish them. He worked for two years at the publishing house ‘Astir’. He was a key contributor to the literary magazine “Fortezza”. He participates as a publishing consultant in the publishing group “Strange Days”. Fifteen years ago he decided to live in Rethymno, Crete. A series of (at first glance) unrelated events, people and situations led him to earn his living through creating and selling ceramic objects.
For more than two years, he studied with the pottery makers Giorgos and Natassa Vardaxi in Rethymnon, who taught him a lot but mainly to dare to become “self-taught”, to experiment with techniques, search for his own ways and not to be afraid to narrate stories he wanted to tell using his own hand-made ceramics instead of words.
He manufactures objects mainly from stoneware clay and combines clay, oxides, paint and glass techniques to create pleasant, face-to-face, use-and-touch objects. The electric furnace and the high temperatures allow for results that he likes to call space therapy objects, always with the challenge of being able to do what inspires your imagination within the strict discipline required by pottery art.
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*hand build ceramic items, aprox. 20 cm height and 6-8 cm diameter. Stoneware clay, hand painted with engobe colors and twice in the kiln at 1100c.
Eyelands Book Awards 