Studio Ceramics

Contemporary ceramists working in Britain, including Rachel Kneebone, Grayson Perry and Edmund de Waal, are part of an international group of artists who work with clay, investigating the ways in which it engages with other art forms and the wider culture.

Recent experimentation with the medium owes much to the rapid evolution of ceramics, the work of mid- and late-twentieth century potters and their reinvention of ceramics as a radical and contemporary art practice. The pioneering methods and rethinking of forms in the work of such exponents as Bernard Leach, Michael Cardew, Lucie Rie, Hans Coper and Alan Caiger-Smith - whose points of reference were drawn from East Asia, Africa, the ancient Mediterranean and the Middle East as much as from their own heritage - continue to influence and inspire contemporary makers.

In this book on the V&A's collection of twentieth- and twenty-first-century British ceramics, an introductory essay provides historical context, documenting the medium's evolution into an expressive and sometimes interventionist art form. A visual chronology and alphabetical artist catalogue provide illustrated biographical sketches of nearly 300 major British ceramists since 1900.