Melting pots: how an ancient material is finding new life

Though clay had its art-world moment a few years ago, with fairs suddenly awash with ceramics of variable merit, Britain has not yet seen a major show putting such sculptures in the spotlight. That’s all set to change with Strange Clay: Ceramics in Contemporary Art at the Hayward Gallery, London (26 October – 8 January 2023), which is being presented as ‘the first large-scale group exhibition in the UK exploring how contemporary artists have used clay in unexpected ways’.

This is, perhaps, not one for studio pottery traditionalists: this is Art with a capital A. Of the 23 artists from around the world – including stars such as Betty Woodman, Ken Price and Ron Nagle – only a smattering use the language of vessels (most famous among them Edmund de Waal, Magdalene Odundo and Grayson Perry). Experimentation is everywhere, however.

Most dramatic among the assorted sculptures and multimedia installations are Takuro Kuwata’s pieces, which radically reimagine time-honoured Japanese techniques. These include kairagi, in which the shrinkage of glaze and clay body are purposefully mismatched to cover surfaces in cracks, or ishihaze, which sees stones embedded into clay. In traditional pottery practice, these rocks would be tiny; Kuwata’s, however, are large enough to cause semi-controlled explosions in the kiln. The resulting sculptures can measure up to three metres high: a far cry from the humble tea bowl.

This spirit of experimentation is, of course, not new. Lucie Rie, the doyenne of British studio pottery – the focus of a touring exhibition, The Adventure of Pottery, opening at MIMA in Middlesbrough (10 November – 12 February 2023, then on to Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge) – was likewise experimenting with ‘the plasticity and the possibilities of ceramics’, as the Hayward’s curators put it, a full century ago.

For Rie, the vessel was sculpture enough; excluding experiments made while a student in Vienna in the early 1920s, she never felt the need for her pots to verge towards pure form. (Her studio mate, closest friend and fellow refugee, Hans Coper, came to the opposite conclusion: he left the shared workshop in which they had been toiling at tableware to set up his own more sculpture-focused studio.)

Instead, she used crockery, in all its domestic familiarity – think bowls, beakers, pourers, even casserole dishes – as a canvas for her slowly evolving experimentation.

While researching my new book on Rie (part of the Modern Women Artists series from Eiderdown Books), I pored over the near-impenetrable notes she made to keep track of her various glaze recipes and firing schedules. Renowned among friends and collectors for her old-world hospitality – with homemade cakes always on offer to guests – it’s not hard to see a connection between Rie’s love of cooking and the experimental glaze recipes she explored and refined.

Among a rainbow of glazes she invented to suit her electric kiln, the most dramatic are lava-like: bubbling and oozing over otherwise well-behaved pots. Their volcanic texture is the result of adding just 3% of silicon carbide to a glaze. Elsewhere, she embraced pinholing – dots punctuating a glaze surface, usually considered a flaw – or went further by thickly layering glazes over coloured clays, creating controlled chaos.

After more than a century of experimentation from artist-potters, it’s clear that the material still offers so much to uncover – in both teacups and towering sculptures alike.