Things of Beauty Growing

Things of Beauty Growing: British Studio Pottery, co-curated with Martina Droth and Simon Olding, opens at the Yale Center British Art in 2017 and travels to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge in 2018. The exhibition tells the story of studio ceramics in Britain, from the 1920s to the present, through the evolution of the vessel form. It opens with the mysterious form of the Moon Jar, originally developed in Korea during the Joseon Dynasty and reinterpreted in 20th century Britain as an emblem of transcendence. The exhibition then presents a series of archetypal forms that mark out a loose chronology, as well as a trajectory of thinking: from the tea bowls that Leach brought from Japan and shaped into the foundations of British pottery, to recent monumental works by Julian Stair, Felicity Aylieff, and Clare Twomey, which have pushed the medium beyond limits previously imagined for it.  The works for the exhibition have been selected from distinguished private collections as well as the great public collections of museums in the UK. Design at Yale is by Steven Saitas. The accompanying book is published by Yale University Press.