Ershov

Ershov is a one-man clay pipe workshop named after ceramicist Vladimir Ershov, who works in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don. The workshop's renown comes not from series production but from the effort to reconstruct the shape language of clay pipes made centuries ago in the Don basin and in Anatolia. In this respect Ershov's work is considered as much an archaeological reconstruction attempt as a craft.

A Return to the Clay Pipe

The master's name is associated with a decision he made in 1980: that year he abandoned free ceramic experimentation and devoted his entire effort to making 17th-century Anatolian-derived clay pipes. By the time the last masters carrying the tradition had died, the clay-body composition, mold-taking, and ornamentation details had also largely gone unrecorded; Ershov tried to fill the missing links by studying period pieces in museum storerooms and through his own experimentation. It is said that he also made some of the tools he worked with by hand himself.

He did not reach this point through a formal craft education. He was born in 1949 in Voronezh, the son of a naval officer; his youth passed through a string of disparate jobs across different cities, from milling to construction work, from archaeological excavation digging to stage design. When he returned to Rostov-on-Don in 1975 he came into contact with ceramics, and according to the record worked as a ceramicist at the city's applied arts workshop. He is said to have produced more than three thousand clay pipes between 1980 and 2014; he is reported to have begun stamping his own mark on his pieces in 1995.