Clay: Form: Contemporary Studio Ceramics

Discover how history and contemporary practice come together in ceramics, as artists reinterpret familiar forms through making, material experimentation and modern contexts.

Across cultures and centuries, clay has been shaped into vessels, bodies, tools and surfaces. Today’s ceramic artists do not move away from these forms; instead they return to them, stretch them, repeat them, distort them and allow them to fail. Form becomes a record of touch, pressure, time and intention.

Written by art historian and Ceramic Review contributor Jessica Browne, Clay: Form brings together an international field of makers working across studio ceramics, functional ware, sculptural practice and relief. Historic works sit alongside contemporary pieces, showing new forms in active dialogue with earlier traditions.

Organised around key approaches, from the reimagined vessel and domestic object to embodied sculpture, abstraction and architectural surface, the book shows how form is shaped by use, scale, the human body and the constraints of the material itself. Works by artists such as Bouke de Vries, Oliver Beer, Florian Gadsby and Fernando Casasempere demonstrate how clay responds to gesture, gravity, repetition and fire.

Combining critical insight with close attention to process, Clay: Form offers students, artists and collectors a way to see ceramic form as something being continually shaped by modern makers.