Demonstrates the technology involved in making and firing ceramics.

Demonstrates the technology involved in making and firing ceramics.

This book is a collection of glimpses into the lives and works of fifteen prominent women artists in contemporary ceramics. Spanning multiple genres, generations, and geographies, these potters and ceramic sculptors describe nuances, contradictions, and tensions surrounding their artworks, artistic processes, and professional lives. Within this text, artistic ambivalences are questioned and analyzed in terms of myriad gender issues. Featured ceramicists include: Maureen Burns-Bowie, Esta Carnahan, Ellen Day, Cara Gay Driscoll, Dolores Dunning, Heidi Fahrenbacher, DeBorah Goletz, Lynn Goodman, Joan Hardin, Beth Heit, Tsehai Johnson, Kate Malone, Norma Messing, Elspeth Owen, and Mary Trainor. The qualitative research summarized within this book draws influence from feminist methodologies and the visual arts methodology of portraiture. Artists, art historians, and art educators interested in ceramics and gender will find detailed discussion of unexpected persistence of gendered associations within ceramic technology, social binaries of gender identity in symbols and traditions of clay, and subtle sexism surrounding ceramics in education. At the same time, this text celebrates women’s work in ceramics as an often neglected set of perspectives, highlighting the intricate complexities of artistic ambivalences and lived experiences of art within a dynamic dialogue.

Artists are increasingly interested in producing work that is not only beautifully designed and produced, but is also environmentally friendly and socially responsible. In Sustainable Ceramics, pioneer Robert Harrison draws on more than four decades of making, and a wealth of experience shared by other artists to present practical possibilities for ceramic artists. This book covers all the factors to consider when going 'green', from fuels and alternative firing technology to energy-saving methods, sustainable ways to collect and use clay itself, and ways to deal with or recycle waste materials and save water. He suggests simple and achievable methods by which to reduce the carbon footprint of ceramic art, and draws on interviews and examples throughout by practitioners who reclaim, reuse and recycle in their studio or work. Sustainable Ceramics is an essential resource for any ceramicist, studio or school looking for ideas on how to reduce the impact of their practice on the environment.

In his major new history, Paul Greenhalgh tells the story of ceramics as a story of human civilisation, from the Ancient Greeks to the present day. As a core craft technology, pottery has underpinned domesticity, business, religion, recreation, architecture, and art for millennia. Indeed, the history of ceramics parallels the development of human society. This fascinating and very human history traces the story of ceramic art and industry from the Ancient Greeks to the Romans and the medieval world; Islamic ceramic cultures and their influence on the Italian Renaissance; Chinese and European porcelain production; modernity and Art Nouveau; the rise of the studio potter, Art Deco, International Style and Mid-Century Modern, and finally, the contemporary explosion of ceramic making and the postmodern potter. Interwoven in this journey through time and place is the story of the pots themselves, the culture of the ceramics, and their character and meaning. Ceramics have had a presence in virtually every country and historical period, and have worked as a commodity servicing every social class. They are omnipresent: a ubiquitous art. Ceramic culture is a clear, unique, definable thing, and has an internal logic that holds it together through millennia. Hence ceramics is the most peculiar and extraordinary of all the arts. At once cheap, expensive, elite, plebeian, high-tech, low-tech, exotic, eccentric, comic, tragic, spiritual, and secular, it has revealed itself to be as fluid as the mud it is made from. Ceramics are the very stuff of how civilized life was, and is, led. This then is the story of human society's most surprising core causes and effects.

Ceramics had a far-reaching impact in the second half of the twentieth century, as its artists worked through the same ideas regarding abstraction and form as those for other creative mediums. Live Form shines new light on the relation of ceramics to the artistic avant-garde by looking at the central role of women in the field: potters who popularized ceramics as they worked with or taught male counterparts like John Cage, Peter Voulkos, and Ken Price. Sorkin focuses on three Americans who promoted ceramics as an advanced artistic medium: Marguerite Wildenhain, a Bauhaus-trained potter and writer; Mary Caroline (M. C.) Richards, who renounced formalism at Black Mountain College to pursue new performative methods; and Susan Peterson, best known for her live throwing demonstrations on public television. Together, these women pioneered a hands-on teaching style and led educational and therapeutic activities for war veterans, students, the elderly, and many others. Far from being an isolated field, ceramics offered a sense of community and social engagement, which, Sorkin argues, crucially set the stage for later participatory forms of art and feminist collectivism.