TABLE MANNERS: CONTEMPORARY INTERNATIONAL CERAMICS

摘要

Exhibitions that set out to be celebratory, as this one explicitly does, usually annoy me. They sound cosy. What is with the celebration, I want to mutter. Bring on the rigour. Bring out the cynicism. So I was intrigued by the prospect of this show. It comes after a long period in which the idea of ceramics for the table has been out of the public eye, whereas the debate around the relationships between sculpture and ceramics has been raging. The two themes have been brought together - most famously in Judy Chicago's Dinner Party of 1972. But the idea of an exhibition that majors on pots, which offers the pleasure of close intimacy with the handmade object, satisfying haptic and numinous needs whether through the pouring of tea, the handling of a cup, its touch on the lips or through the character of the potter embedded in the piece' to quote Emmanuel Cooper, the curator, contends that the theme of the domestic has been overlooked and that it was time for a reappraisal. He is also setting out a stall for where the values of this kind of pottery lie. We are going to find value through the whole sensory, intimate, discovery of the pot. The timing of this is interesting as the academic world is now catching up with what the world of pottery has always known: the field of 'sensory studies' is burgeoning with a new journal and two excellent readers published in the last year.