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Ceramic Arts — Babel Nexus Index

The Applied Art of Clay & Fire

A Level I science chamber of the Babel Nexus Index · 29 primary-source records.

Explore this collection

Ceramics are both made objects and historical evidence: clay, glaze, marks, excavation, industry, and collecting reveal how craft travels through time.

Cornerstones

Reading threads

Histories of Ware

Broad surveys organize pottery and porcelain by material, period, place, and changing standards of taste.

Marks and Collections

Handbooks and catalogues teach readers to identify makers, techniques, regions, and traditions through objects and their marks.

Pots as Evidence

Archaeology and cross-cultural study recover chronology, technique, exchange, and daily life from surviving vessels.

Workshop Practice

Practical manuals move from clay preparation and forming to firing, decoration, painting, and studio teaching.

Industry and Makers

Regional histories and biographies connect individual makers to factories, markets, labor, and national ceramic industries.

A reader’s introduction

Ceramic arts joins the practical work of shaping and firing clay with the history of pottery and porcelain. This collection moves from prehistoric and Athenian pottery to Chinese porcelain, British factories, studio methods, decoration, marks, wheels, kilns, and glazes.

Start here: three works

  1. Charles Fergus Binns — The Potter's Craft: A Practical Guide for the Studio and Workshop (2nd ed.) — Begin with a studio manual covering the potter’s working process.
  2. Gisela M. A. Richter — The Craft of Athenian Pottery — See how archaeological evidence reconstructs an ancient ceramic practice.
  3. R. L. Hobson — Chinese Pottery and Porcelain, Vol. I — Enter the history of Chinese wares through a specialist survey.

Choose a practical manual to learn how pottery is made, or a historical survey to identify periods, materials, workshops, and traditions.

What Ceramic Arts argues

  • This is the hexagonal gallery of Ceramic Arts — the applied art of clay and fire: the making of pottery and porcelain and the long study of how it is shaped, glazed, and fired. It is the shelf of the potter's manual, the connoisseur's handbook, and the history of the kiln, from prehistoric earthenware to the porcelain of China and the great factories of Europe.
  • It gathers the founders of ceramic history and the teachers of the craft — Marryat, Chaffers, and Jewitt on the wares of the world, Hobson on the porcelain of China, Petrie and Richter on the pottery of the ancient world, and the studio manuals of Binns, Cox, and White that taught the wheel and the glaze. Each is a record of the potter's art made teachable and reproducible in print.
  • Every card carries an authentic public-domain likeness of its author where one survives, or a scan of a public-domain edition where none does; all the works are in the public domain.

Primary works in Ceramic Arts (29)

Chambers connected to Ceramic Arts

  • Handicraft — Ceramic art is handicraft in clay — the same disciplined making of useful and beautiful things that the pattern book and the workshop manual teach in thread and letter. The potter's wheel and the kiln belong to the same world of technique passed hand to hand and set down in print.
  • Chemistry — Pottery is applied chemistry — the transformation of earth by fire. Clay bodies, glazes, and the control of the kiln are matters of composition and reaction, and the potter's craft advanced hand in hand with the chemistry of materials.
  • Engineering — The Staffordshire potteries and the Wedgwood works were engineering as much as art — kilns, moulds, and the division of labour that turned the potter's craft into a modern industry. Ceramic making is construction by rule and method, shaped for production.