The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Slab-Built Ceramics by Coll Minogue

Coll Minogue’s Slab-Built Ceramics presents itself — and persuades — as more than a how-to manual: it is a meditation on process, an argument about the expressive possibilities lodged in a single, humble slab of clay. Read as a craft text, it is pedagogically rigorous; read as an artist’s tract, it is provocatively poetic. Read as a literary critic might read it, the book stages an ongoing dialogue between hand and surface, between architecture and bodily gesture, and between the stubborn materiality of clay and the finicky demands of form.

At the level of structure, Minogue arranges the book with a quiet, almost architectural logic. Opening chapters ground the reader in the basic grammar of slabs — preparation, rolling, measuring, scoring, and joining — not as dry steps but as the opening sentences of a language. Subsequent sections develop that language into syntax: boxes, platters, folded forms, and reliefs that function like phrases. Interspersed are projects that operate as short stories; each carries a beginning (idea and preparation), a middle (construction and trouble), and an end (finishing and firing). This dramaturgy is effective: the beginner is guided; the more advanced maker sees how formal decisions accumulate into meaning.

The author’s strongest achievement is his attention to the dialectic of control and accident. Slab building is often spoken of in terms of geometry and restraint — planes and right angles — but he rescues the technique from austerity by insisting on the place of chance: the seam that separates, the shrinkage that surprises, the spontaneous mark that becomes the pivot of the whole object. He treats joins not simply as technical problems but as expressive opportunities. Where other craft manuals conceal their corrections and compromises, Slab-Built Ceramics foregrounds them, making visible the pottery’s history of corrective gestures. The result is a book that feels honest about craft as lived labour rather than a catalogue of idealized, perfect outcomes.

The visual program of the book is also eloquent. Photographs and diagrams perform complementary roles: diagrams supply exactitude where necessary (angles, templates, step sequences), while photographs record the tactile consequences — finger seams, scored textures, the way light slides off a salted surface. The photography resists the glossy fetishization common to many studio books; instead it privileges the trace, the fingerprint, the slightly irregular rim that testifies to human involvement. This aesthetic affinity with wabi-sabi — the beauty of the imperfect and transient — is one of the book’s quiet claims to originality.

Minogue is alert too to the politics of making. He situates slab building as a democratic technique: it requires few specialist tools, scales easily for group work, and is particularly amenable to teaching contexts. There is a recurring pedagogical voice — conversational, patient — that will comfort teachers and workshop leaders. Yet the book does not domesticate ambition: projects escalate in conceptual sophistication. A seemingly straightforward folded bowl can be read as an exercise in containment, memory, or domestic ritual; a relief panel becomes an arena for pictorial narrative. The text thus manages the delicate balance of being both practical and suggestive, procedural and interpretive.

Where the book is less satisfying is in its engagement with historical and theoretical contexts. Minogue is at his best when close to the making table; when he steps back to locate slab techniques within broader ceramic histories or contemporary sculptural debates, the account occasionally feels cursory. Readers seeking an extended critical genealogy of slab work — comparative analyses with slab traditions in other cultures, or a deep dive into the aesthetics of architectural ceramics — may find the book wanting. Similarly, technical chapters could sometimes benefit from more detailed discussion of firing protocols and glaze chemistry for those who want laboratory-grade certainty rather than studio rules of thumb.

Stylistically, the prose is un-showy, but intelligent. Minogue writes like a practitioner who is also a careful observer: sentences are spare, occasionally lyrical, and never condescending. He trusts the reader’s eye and the clay’s capacity to teach; he intersperses clear stepwise instruction with short interrogative riffs that invite reflection: why make a corner seam visible? What does a folded plane ask of the viewer? Those small philosophical nudges elevate the book from manual to manifesto.

For whom is Slab-Built Ceramics best suited? Its natural home is the ceramics classroom and the community studio. Beginners will find its clarity and sequencing reassuring; intermediate makers will appreciate the projects that push structural thinking; teachers will value the way exercises scale for groups. Professional artists working at the conceptual margin will find useful strategies but may want to supplement the volume with more theory or technical appendices.

Slab-Built Ceramics is a quietly persuasive book: methodical where it must be, reflective where it can afford to be, and patient enough to let mistakes become meaning. It is a reminder that technique is never merely instrumental — it shapes thought as much as it shapes object. The book is at once a practical companion and a gentle provocation, urging makers to consider how planes joined and edges trimmed constitute a particular kind of thinking in clay. For anyone interested in the grammar of form-making, and the small, stubborn ways clay remembers a hand, this book is a rich and humane guide.