Marmalade Issue 5, 2017

Feature
Studio Pottery
Words by Damon Moon
Damon Moon is Creative Director of the Ceramics Studio
at JamFactory.
Throughout most of history, pottery has
been a collective affair that has availed
itself of the level of industry, scale of
production and techniques of manufacture
appropriate to a particular time and place.
The objects that resulted from these endeavours may have
been rudely functional or highly decorative, with their
workplace origins ranging from small rural concerns to
industries encompassing entire cities, as in the group of
six towns that comprised the district of Stoke-on-Trent in
England or the city of Jingdezhen in China, which had a
continuous history of porcelain manufacture and export for
over a thousand years.
In fact, it was only really in the late 19th century, as a
result of the changing nature of art and the influence of
philosophies towards handcrafts espoused by the Arts and
Crafts movement, that a new approach to making came into
being and a new practitioner appeared – the artist or ‘studio
potter’, so named because their workplace resembled an
artist’s studio and the results of their labour edged closer
to the world of art whilst retreating from the practicalities
of industry.
Just when the term ‘studio pottery’ first appeared is unclear,
but what it described went beyond a style of work to
encompass an approach to making and a lifestyle that for
many was – and still is – more vocation than occupation.
That there was a certain element of nostalgia underpinning
this trend is undeniable, however in every era, it seems that
periods of social upheaval and a rapid growth of industry
and technological advancement is augmented by a growth
of interest in making on a small scale, or what may now be
called ‘slow’ making or the ‘makers’ movement’. For every
action there is a reaction.
30 / ISSUE 05