A Ceramic History by Edmund de Waal

1. Clay and Process
2. Pioneering Definitions 1900-1940 The Studio Pot
3. European Influences: Lucie Rie and Hans Coper
4. Art Schools: A New Ceramics?
5. Teachers: Who Taught You Then?
6. Altogether Elsewhere: Cultural Diversity and the Studio Pot
7. Painterly Surfaces?
8. Does it Pour? Function in Studio Pottery
9. Necessary Pots? Unnecessary Pots?

8. Does it Pour? Function in Studio Pottery

There are many different ways in which pots can function. Sometimes a pot can be hedged around by how useful it is: it tells us that it will be eminently functional through its sturdiness and solidity, its balance when filled, its wipe-clean glazed surfaces. It can tell us it is functional, for everyday usage, through its sensible low price and through the presence of companion examples. 'Use me, drop me, replace me' is the message. Function here can mean the lowest common denominator of ceramic meaning: a pot that has meant to be the barely visible carrier of food and drink. Sometimes a pot that appears to be quirkly on the edge of the non-functional becomes happily alive to use when held, filled, drunk from. Sometimes pots that we are told, firmly, are useful, do not redeem that promise when taken home and lived with. Pots in other words 'play' on function all the time.

One of the major themes of the pioneer studio pottery movement was to convert people who were only marginally interested in pots into having them through an appeal to utility. Leach's Standard Ware did these during the Second World War. Now with any number of possibilities of kinds of objects to buy that would satisfy a need for utility, studio pots project their possible function in different ways. In the case of Joanna Constantinidis (1927-) porcelain cups and saucers, bowls and dishes of great austerity are glazed with a light cream-white milky glaze. The pots are exact (unwarped, balanced, unblemished) yet far from industrially perfect. They belong to the Modernist world of the 'pure functional object' but are still resonantly made by a particular hand. With the work of Julian Stair (1955-), by contrast, though his pots share some of the same forebears as Constantinidis, there is an interest in weight and gravity. They are not light pots: they are perfectly balanced without proclaiming their overt functionality.

Wally Keeler (1942-) is a potter who makes pots that investigate function in expressive and intriguing ways. His salt-glazed pots with their sharply delineated rims, handles and spouts take as part of their vocabulary the industrial oil-can as well as eighteenth century ceramics. He is constantly playing with expectations of how pots appear to retain function. As he has written: 'The goal in this complex process is the finished pot performing its function; a surprising object doing a commonplace job.' This short statement encapsulates many of the hopes of contemporary studio potters who make pots that can be used.