This spirit of experimentation is, of course, not new. Lucie Rie, the doyenne of British studio pottery – the focus of a touring exhibition, The Adventure of Pottery, opening at MIMA in Middlesbrough (10 November – 12 February 2023, then on to Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge) – was likewise experimenting with ‘the plasticity and the possibilities of ceramics’, as the Hayward’s curators put it, a full century ago.
For Rie, the vessel was sculpture enough; excluding experiments made while a student in Vienna in the early 1920s, she never felt the need for her pots to verge towards pure form. (Her studio mate, closest friend and fellow refugee, Hans Coper, came to the opposite conclusion: he left the shared workshop in which they had been toiling at tableware to set up his own more sculpture-focused studio.)
Instead, she used crockery, in all its domestic familiarity – think bowls, beakers, pourers, even casserole dishes – as a canvas for her slowly evolving experimentation.