Robbin Harris

Robbin came to ceramics after a long and varied creative career. He began as a professional musician and martial artist, leaving Canada at nineteen to perform throughout Asia. Over the following years he lived and worked in Taiwan, Japan, Thailand and Hong Kong/China, while also pursuing martial arts, performance and film. He later founded Deep Down Records in New York, producing and performing on recordings before a serious leg injury brought his professional music career to an end.

Years later, an introductory ceramics class at Fairview Studios in Calgary introduced him to clay. The connection was immediate. What began as a new creative discipline developed into a full-time studio practice and a continuation of many of the ideas that had driven his earlier work: repetition, improvisation, technical discipline and the willingness to allow a process to move somewhere unexpected.

Crystalline glazing became central to Robbin's practice because it contains a similar tension between control and unpredictability. The form, glaze application and firing can be carefully considered, but the final surface cannot be completely predetermined. Crystals develop across the porcelain in formations that can suggest geology, frost, flowers, microscopic organisms or distant landscapes.

Robbin is increasingly interested in taking crystalline ceramics beyond the forms traditionally associated with the technique. Alongside vessels and large platters, his practice has expanded into more sculptural work influenced by geological processes, fungi, mycelial networks and imagined natural environments. Texture, irregularity and altered silhouettes are becoming increasingly important as he explores how crystalline surfaces can interact with more complex forms.

Rather than treating crystalline glaze as the final objective, Harris approaches it as one material within a broader investigation of form, surface and transformation.