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A far cry from throwing a pot

Dahn is known for her research on and response to a range of ceramics practices and is in dialogue with key practitioners. Commissioned by Andrew Livingstone, Head of the Department of Ceramics and Glass at the University of Sunderland, the chapter takes as its starting point the 1993 watershed exhibition ‘The Raw and the Cooked’ and considers how Ceramics has developed as a field of enquiry since then. The growing body of critical discourse in the field is addressed and Dahn discusses narrative content in ceramics work, identifying Edmund de Waal as a key individual whose own writing is important in the promotion of his work. De Waal is positioned as an exponent of ‘semiotic gesture’, as is Paul Scott who has championed print in ceramics. Dahn also argues that a rise in interest in Material Culture studies has enhanced general understanding of how objects function in the creation of meaning and thus expanded notions of ceramic history and theory.