T.A.E.’s Book Review – 500 Plates & Chargers: Innovative Expressions of Function & Style editor Suzanne J. E. Tourtillot

Among the many volumes in Lark Books’ celebrated 500 series, 500 Plates & Chargers: Innovative Expressions of Function & Style stands as one of the most compelling demonstrations of how a familiar domestic object can become an arena for artistic invention. Juried by ceramic artist Linda Arbuckle and edited by Suzanne J. E. Tourtillot, this lavishly illustrated collection assembles five hundred contemporary ceramic works that dissolve the traditional distinction between utility and sculpture. Rather than presenting the plate merely as a vessel for food, the volume asks readers to reconsider it as a surface for narrative, abstraction, technical experimentation, and philosophical reflection.

The editors establish this premise immediately in the publisher’s introduction:

“Plates and chargers can serve as more than just places to put your food: they can be glorious art to show off on a table, sideboard, or hutch.”

This deceptively simple statement becomes the organizing principle for the entire collection. Throughout its more than four hundred pages, the humble circular form repeatedly transforms into painting, relief sculpture, architectural object, landscape, biological specimen, and conceptual artwork.

Unlike traditional ceramics books organized by historical period or technique, 500 Plates & Chargers functions as a visual conversation among hundreds of artists. Each page juxtaposes radically different approaches to the same essential form. One encounters minimalist porcelain whose restraint echoes Japanese aesthetics alongside exuberantly decorated earthenware exploding with colour, layered imagery, and texture. The result resembles wandering through a major international ceramics exhibition where each turn reveals another unexpected interpretation.

One of the book’s greatest strengths lies in demonstrating that innovation rarely requires abandoning tradition. Many artists employ classical throwing techniques while reinventing decoration through unconventional glazing, carving, photographic transfer, sgraffito, wax resist, or mixed-media processes. Others fracture the very geometry of the plate, bending, folding, piercing, or assembling multiple components until functionality gives way to sculptural presence.

The editors highlight this diversity in describing the featured works: “…chosen by esteemed juror Linda Arbuckle… crafted from a remarkable variety of materials—including pristine porcelain and bold earthenware.”

The emphasis on material diversity becomes one of the collection’s central scholarly contributions. Rather than privileging porcelain as the pinnacle of ceramic achievement, the volume celebrates every clay body for its expressive possibilities. Earthenware possesses warmth and immediacy; stoneware communicates physicality and permanence; porcelain achieves extraordinary delicacy and luminosity. Each medium becomes a distinct visual language rather than merely a technical choice.

Equally impressive is the remarkable range of surface treatments. The brief captions accompanying each image become miniature technical studies, recording methods such as reduction firing, soda firing, wood firing, majolica, terra sigillata, slip trailing, inlay, lustre, wax resist, and silk-screen transfer. While these notes occupy only a few lines, collectively they form an encyclopedic survey of contemporary ceramic practice.

The description of individual works hints at this technical richness: “Nick Joerling’s stoneware is the perfect canvas for a design: vigorous brush strokes set in wax resist race across its attractive surface.”

The language emphasizes movement rather than ornament. Decoration is presented not as embellishment but as gesture—evidence of the artist’s hand preserved permanently within fired clay.

Similarly, Kelly McKibben’s Going for a Stroll is praised for its “…delicately inlaid and silk-screened images.”

Here the plate becomes less a serving object than a pictorial field where printmaking, drawing, and ceramics intersect. Such examples demonstrate that contemporary ceramic practice increasingly refuses disciplinary boundaries.

For practicing ceramic artists, the greatest value of this volume lies not in imitation but in possibility. Because no artist receives more than a page or two, the reader is continually propelled forward into fresh visual territory. Every spread introduces new compositional solutions, new firing approaches, new relationships between rim and centre, texture and glaze, function and abstraction.

This rhythm distinguishes the book from conventional monographs. Instead of following the evolution of a single artist’s style, readers experience a continual expansion of ceramic vocabulary. The cumulative effect is intellectually energizing. After fifty pages, one begins noticing recurring themes—geological surfaces, botanical motifs, architectural geometries, calligraphic marks—but each artist interprets these ideas differently, revealing the astonishing elasticity of the plate as an artistic form.

The volume also succeeds as an historical document. Published during a particularly fertile period in contemporary ceramics, it captures the field at a moment when studio pottery had fully embraced conceptual art while remaining deeply committed to craftsmanship. The collection documents an international community increasingly willing to question the hierarchy separating functional objects from gallery sculpture.

From an educational perspective, the book is exceptionally valuable. Students quickly discover that technical mastery alone does not produce memorable ceramics. The strongest works unite impeccable craftsmanship with a coherent artistic voice. Conversely, conceptual ambition succeeds only when supported by disciplined execution. Every page quietly reinforces this dialogue between idea and making.

The photography deserves special praise. Images are consistently crisp, evenly lit, and carefully cropped, allowing subtle glaze variation, carved texture, and edge profile to remain visible. Although scale is inevitably compressed within a book format, the photographs communicate material presence remarkably well. One almost senses the weight of stoneware, the translucency of porcelain, or the tactile roughness of unglazed clay.

If the volume has one limitation, it is an unavoidable consequence of its ambitious scope. With five hundred featured works, contextual analysis remains necessarily brief. Readers hoping for extended artist interviews, critical essays, or deeper explorations of individual practices will need to seek additional sources. Yet this apparent weakness ultimately becomes a strength. Rather than prescribing interpretations, the editors invite sustained looking—the very practice upon which visual literacy depends.

Ultimately, 500 Plates & Chargers argues that the plate occupies a unique position within ceramic art. It is simultaneously painting and sculpture, object and image, ritual and utility. The familiar circular format becomes an open field where artists negotiate identity, memory, decoration, abstraction, and material experimentation.

More than an anthology, this volume serves as an atlas of contemporary ceramic imagination. It reminds us that even the most ordinary household object possesses inexhaustible artistic potential when approached with curiosity, technical excellence, and creative courage. For ceramic artists, collectors, educators, and anyone fascinated by the intersection of function and beauty, 500 Plates & Chargers remains one of the finest visual surveys of contemporary ceramic practice—a book that continually rewards slow observation and repeated return.