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.
