Last year, Alma Berrow watched nervously as her large ceramic sculpture of a pink shell filled with snuffed-out cigarette butts went up for auction at Sotheby’s. Ifs and Butts’ inclusion in the auction alongside work by artists such as Barbara Hepworth and Tracey Emin was enough to surprise and satisfy Berrow, a former fashion designer who had only begun working with ceramics the year before. She expected the piece to go for about £1,000 and was stunned when it sold for £16,000. But pottery, especially pottery with a sense of humour, is having a moment.
“It’s such playful art … I think that ceramics in the art world hasn’t always been taken so seriously, so it’s fun to see a resurgence. It is so deeply ingrained in society all the way back to the earliest artefacts, so to see it being integrated into the art world is wicked,” she says.
At the opposite end of the price scale, wonky mugs, cartoon character egg cups and to-scale sculptures of condom packets line the walls of Mark Farhall’s DIY Art Shop in east London. The artist turned art dealer would attend independent shows put on by illustrators and began to notice more sculptural work popping up. Inspired by do-it-yourself counterculture, Farhall organised the Independent Ceramics Fair, offering low-priced stalls to new graduates and outsider artists.
While previous generations of small-scale studio potters tended to make elegant, functional tableware or sculptural vessels influenced by Japanese, Chinese and Korean design, the new generation is inspired by everyday objects, consumer culture and cartoon-like characters, rendering them in clay and often eschewing formal processes in favour of simpler techniques.
“It’s punk crock!” says Farhall. “For me, this sums up the DIY mindset of this new wave of emerging ceramic artists. They embrace difference, create ceramics that are personal, and use tools like Instagram and TikTok to build and support a community.”
One of these artists is Louise Daneels, an illustrator from Ghent, Belgium, who makes ceramic sculptures of everyday items, such as toothpaste and tampons. “It’s a bit pop art-ish,” she says. “It’s not about making a statement with my work, but capturing a memory.” She began by making a few items as part of a graduate show, and started producing more when friends and online followers began to request them.
Similarly, disposable plastic bags are the subject of Kimberley Williamson’s work. Some of her little ceramic bags have the blue and white stripes associated with trips to the corner shop; others are painted with an upside-down smiley face and the words “NO THANK YOU GO AWAY”.
“There is something great about the style and design of plastic bags,” she says. “Their single-use consumption is a massive issue, so I wanted to make something that would have pride of place in homes and create conversations.” Williamson was working as a baker, but when the pandemic hit she found herselfwith time on her hands during lockdown. She began making ceramic bags at the small desk in her house with air-dry clay, a sewing needle, a cuticle pusher and a rubber-tipped paintbrush. She thought about putting her work out into the world after a friend saw the bags and encouraged her to sell them. They proved so popular that Williamson was able to give up her job at the time and build a home studio with its own kiln at the bottom of her Edinburgh garden. She has since been commissioned by the V&A, collaborated with Nando’s restaurant chain and even swapped one of her pieces with the celebrity ceramicist Seth Rogen.
Artists have also taken aim at fashion labels: Dior and Yves Saint Laurent logos are repeated and glazed on to the chintzy cups made by the US-based artist the Mud Fairy, while Rapiditas features a mashup of Nike, Gucci and McDonald’s logos on its classic but crooked Greek jug. It’s as if millennial and gen Z artists, born into and living through recessions, are playing with and rejecting the high-end consumer culture from which many feel excluded.
It follows, then, that there is also a tinge of nihilism in the work, as seen in Berrow’s snuffed-out ceramic cigarettes. The artist began making ashtrays filled with oyster shells, Rizla papers, joint ends, olives, dice and gold teeth during lockdown – work that spoke to the yearning she had for the parties, late nights and abandon she was unable to experience. “When you take the smallest moments, like an orange peel with a cigarette in it, or a teabag on the side,and you turn that into clay and immortalise it, it takes on its own narrative.”
Elsewhere, artists draw lighthearted inspiration from the fictional characters of their childhoods. Daisy Tortuga makes deliberately shonky “Simpsuns” egg cups – think Milhouse as interpreted through a fever dream – while Inga Krause produces dog-shaped vases and wall hooks, and Jack Mears sculpts human-dog creatures simply because they make him laugh.
This rebelliousness and sense of fun extends to a disregard for classical form. Rather than throwing perfectly symmetrical vases on a wheel or pouring porcelain into a mould, artists hand-build pieces and push them out of shape, while surfaces are left unfinished. For Krause: “The technique is secondary. It is more a tool to let my work emerge.”
Clay is a forgiving medium. One wrong stroke on a canvas and it is hard to remedy your mistake, but with clay there is a chance at each stage – from the initial shaping to the layers of glazing after the clay has been “bisque” fired – to fix unintentional marks or to experiment and keep the imperfections.
Such imperfections are also being embraced by collectors as a pushback against the mass production of mainstream ceramics. “Modern ceramics factories are much more similar to car factories than, say, the Wedgwood of 70 years ago,” says Edward Austin, a senior lecturer and course leader for MA Ceramics at Staffordshire University. “In the 50s, they would have employed 2,500 people, making small volumes: a lot of people, a lot of processes, a lot of man hours. But now, in a modern factory like Churchill or Wade, they use industrial robots.” In the past, classic brands such as Royal Crown Derby were rare and expensive, but ceramics made in high volume have lost their value and, increasingly, consumers appear more interested in authenticity.
Artists and collectors have embraced analogue methods, while social media has created opportunities for artists to connect directly with buyers. Berrow’s journey to selling her work started when a friend with a large social media following posted a photo of one of her ashtrays online. “The art world is very difficult to get into, but the visibility on Instagram is crazy,” she says.
For those more interested in making ceramics than in buying them, a bag of air-dry clay can cost less than £5 and YouTube has a vast library of instructional videos, such as how to make a pinch pot by shaping a ball of clay with your hands, or a small vase by coiling rolls of clay, no wheels or kilns needed.
Some councils offer beginner and intermediate pottery courses, with discounts given to anyone without an income. For those wanting to take things up a notch, it’s possible to rent professionally equipped studio spaces and kilns. Hazel Stephenson, who runs The Pottery Experience in Newcastle, has noticed an increase in bookings, thanks to the popularity of the TV show The Great Pottery Throw Down, and perhaps gen Z’s predilection for booze-free socialising. Customers are prioritising fun, rather than the value of the end product. Her most popular class is one in which students make breast-shaped plant pots.
“In throwing lessons, people say that they want to make a straight beaker, and then you see their disappointment at the end when they realise it’s just a straight beaker,” she says. “They think they want perfection, and when they get it they want that wobbly bit back.”
