Glazed Expressions: Contemporary Art and Ceramics

The Hepworth Wakefield is currently staging the first UK retrospective of the American artist Lynda Benglis. Since the 1960s she has explored the materiality of a wide range of media including wax, polyurethane, bronze, textiles, glass, and clay. Benglis trained as a ceramicist early in her career, returning to the medium in the 1990s and the exhibition foregrounds this work as an integral part of her practice.

This roundtable will use Benglis' ceramic works as a point of departure for looking at the use of the medium by artists working outside of the field of craft in the UK. The backdrop of Studio Ceramics provides a further context given The Hepworth Wakefield's continuing exploration of British Modernism and the proximity of York's newly established CoCA (Centre of Ceramic Arts).

However, while the relationship between British Studio Ceramics and its place within modernist discourse is an important reference point for many contemporary artists working in the UK today, others take their influence from elsewhere, for example the Californian Funk ceramics of artists like Keith Arneson or expressionist works of Peter Voulkos.

This roundtable brings together contemporary practitioners whose work uses ceramics to encourage discussion around a series of questions: Why are ceramics so visible within contemporary artistic practice today? What is the role of the collective or workshop model in contemporary practice? What is the relationship between craft and art now? Is the ceramic medium wedded to traditional forms?

A collaboration between the Hepworth Wakefield and the University of York.

Speakers: Aaron Angell (Troy Town Art Pottery), Emma Hart, Phil Root (The Grantchester Pottery) and Jesse Wine.

Tickets are £5 (£4 concessions) and free to students.  Please note that advanced booking is essential.

To book tickets please contact 01924 247360.


Supported by The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the University of York.