Things of beauty growing: British studio pottery
Droth, Martina and Adamson, Glenn and Olding, Simon (2017) Things of beauty growing: British studio pottery. [Ceramics, Craft, Curation, Exhibition/show]
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An exhibition of British Studio Pottery, commissioned and presented first at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT September 14 to December 3 2017; and then to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, March 20 to June 18, 2018.
The exhibition will tell the story of studio pottery in Britain, from the 1920s to the present, through the evolution of the vessel form. Jar, bowl, charger, monumental urn: this family of forms ties ceramics to its functional origins. A vessel exists to hold or contain—a purpose it may fulfill literally, metaphorically, or both. The antiquity of the vessel, the familiarity of its shapes and forms, provides a ready-made language, which ceramic artists have for decades invoked and emulated but also distanced, transformed, and renewed. This exhibition will trace the major typologies that have defined studio ceramics since the early twentieth century and will open with the mysterious form of the moon jar, originally developed in Korea during the Joseon dynasty and reinterpreted in twentieth-century Britain as an emblem of transcendence. The exhibition then will present a series of archetypal forms that mark out a loose chronology, as well as a trajectory of thinking: from the tea bowls that Bernard Leach brought from Japan and shaped into the foundations of British pottery to recent monumental works by Julian Stair, Felicity Aylieff, and Clare Twomey, which have pushed the medium beyond limits previously imagined.
While varied, diverse, and original in their individual conception, the ceramic works that will be assembled, nevertheless share a common vocabulary. The vessel form can be expressive, but it also imparts a sense of introversion: a means by which the ceramic tradition can continually reclaim and reinvent itself, through constant reference to the medium’s own history. The exhibition will accordingly provide a deep historical context for British studio ceramics, including objects from Europe, Japan, and Korea. The works for the exhibition have been selected from distinguished private collections as well as the great museum collections in the UK.
“Things of Beauty Growing”: British Studio Pottery is being organized by the Yale Center for British Art and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and co-curated by Martina Droth, Deputy Director of Research and Curator of Sculpture at the Center; Glenn Adamson, Senior Research Associate at the Center; and Simon Olding, Director, Crafts Study Centre, and Professor of Contemporary Crafts, University for Creative Arts, Farnham.
The organizing curator at the Fitzwilliam Museum is Victoria Avery, Keeper of Applied Arts.
Accompanying exhibition catalogue: http://www.research.ucreative.ac.uk/3315/
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