Biography
Initially trained as a nurse, then worked with mentally disabled people for several years.
1978-1983 Extensive international travel including Afghanistan, India, Spain and Israel
1991 Set up a pottery studio with partner Niek Hoogland at Grotestraat 52 in Tegelen
1993 Set up larger studio at Bongerdstraat 26A in Tegelen
1997 We move the studio, shop and family to Parkstraat 11B in Steyl
1999 Work full time in pottery and begin personal body of work.
Training
1991 Studio experience with partner Niek Hoogland
2002-2006 Pottery training with Joop Crompvoets, Pottenbakkerij de Walsberg in Swalmen.
Work in public collections
- Rufford Ceramic Centre, Ollerton, Notts, UK
- El Museo Nacional de ceramica y Artes Suntuarias ‘Gonzales Marti’, Valencia
- Collection Adolf Egner, Valencia, Spain.
In 1991 Niek Hoogland and I set up our pottery Pottenbakkerij Hoogland in Tegelen. We are both makers of ‘slipware’ ceramics. We like to make pots for daily use. We also make more free work for exhibitions and commissioned work. Since 1997 we live and work a stone’s throw from the river Maas in the monastic village of Steyl near Venlo.
All our work is made from a red-firing earthenware clay, a mixture of locally dug clay and sand and an earthenware clay from the Westerwald. Most of the work we produce is made on the potters’ wheel or slab built. Decoration is done with coloured slips or engobes. We use a wide variety of brushes and slip trailers to decorate our work. More subtle decorations are scratched through the white slip to reveal the underlying red clay, a technique that is called sgraffito. After decorating, the work is raw glazed with a transparent glaze and fired to 1,100 degrees centrigrade in either a gas or an electric kiln. Slipware ceramics originate in the Byzantine and early Islamic Middle-East and the technique spread all over Europe in the Middle Ages. Tegelen and Steyl are geographically part of the Nieder-Rhein or Lower-Rhein region, an area that from the 17th Century developed into a centre for slipware ceramics – a tradition that lasts to this day. Although we don’t feel inheritors of this centuries old tradition, we do feel it as an important source and starting point from which we want to develop our work as contemporary potters.
Source: http://niekhoogland.nl/ and https://mungyeongint.wordpress.com/netherlands-pim-van-huisseling/