Marilyn McCully’s Picasso: Painter and Sculptor in Clay performs the double service every good exhibition catalogue must: it documents a body of work that has long been underrated in mainstream Picasso scholarship, and it supplies interpretive apparatus sufficient to make that body of work matter anew. The volume — produced to accompany the Royal Academy … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Picasso: Painter and Sculptor in Clay by Marilyn McCully
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Sex Pots – Eroticism in Ceramics by Paul Mathieu
Paul Mathieu’s Sex Pots is a bracing, often surprising intervention in both ceramics scholarship and the wider study of erotic art. Its premise is simple and stubbornly persuasive: clay and the vessel-form have been unusually intimate companions to human sexuality across cultures and ages, and the history of ceramics is one of repeated, inventive erotic … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Sex Pots – Eroticism in Ceramics by Paul Mathieu
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Martha Drexler Lynn’s American Studio Ceramics
Martha Drexler Lynn’s American Studio Ceramics is a capacious, corrective history: ambitious in chronological sweep, painstaking in archival detail, and insistently revisionist in its aim to relocate mid-century ceramics within the narrative of American modernism. Lynn’s central claim — that between roughly 1940 and 1979 studio ceramics migrated from domestic craft into the arena of … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Martha Drexler Lynn’s American Studio Ceramics
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Fauves and Fauvism by Jean Leymarie
Jean Leymarie’s Fauves and Fauvism reads less like a conventional survey and more like a practiced act of recovery: it brings into focus a moment that, though brief, reoriented the possibilities of painting for the twentieth century. Leymarie approaches the subject with the twin tools of an attentive connoisseur and a synthetic historian—he situates the … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Fauves and Fauvism by Jean Leymarie
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Pottery Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide to Throwing Beautiful, Functional Pots by Simon Leach
Simon Leach’s Pottery Handbook stands as both a technical manual and a philosophical meditation on craft. Descended from one of Britain’s most celebrated lineages of studio potters—his grandfather Bernard Leach being the seminal figure in the Anglo-Japanese pottery tradition—Simon Leach bridges tradition and contemporaneity with rare grace. His handbook is not merely an instructional text … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Pottery Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide to Throwing Beautiful, Functional Pots by Simon Leach
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 500 Knives: Celebrating Traditional & Innovative Designs, Edited by Marthe Le van
Marthe Le Van’s 500 Knives is at once a catalogue of craft and a meditation on form. Like other volumes in the “500” series, it trusts the visual authority of objects to make an argument: that knives—tools born of necessity—have been consistently shaped by cultural priorities, technological change, and aesthetic impulse. The book’s pleasures are … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 500 Knives: Celebrating Traditional & Innovative Designs, Edited by Marthe Le van
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Masters: Porcelain: Major Works by Leading Ceramists by Lark Press
Porcelain is the element of modern ceramics that most insistently asks to be read: thin as a page, luminous as lamp-glass, it carries with it histories of trade, empire, ritual and domestic intimacy. Masters: Porcelain is, at its best, a sustained act of close-looking — not a how-to manual but a catalogue raisonné of presence. … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Masters: Porcelain: Major Works by Leading Ceramists by Lark Press
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 400 Polymer Clay Designs: A Collection of Dynamic & Colourful Work by Lark Press
At first glance this is a book that does exactly what its title promises: it assembles—visually, insistently—four hundred discrete answers to a single set of questions about colour, form and surface. But read as a sculptural essay rather than merely a compendium, 400 Polymer Clay Designs offers a fuller argument about what a low-cost, thermoplastic … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 400 Polymer Clay Designs: A Collection of Dynamic & Colourful Work by Lark Press
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Penland Book of Ceramics: Masterclasses in Ceramic Techniques by Lark Press
The Penland Book of Ceramics is less a manual than a curated conversation: a communal atlas of gesture, material, and the apprentice's slow apprenticeship into the logic of clay. Brought together under the auspices of a school whose name has become shorthand for intensive craft pedagogy, this volume reads like a series of masterclasses transcribed … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Penland Book of Ceramics: Masterclasses in Ceramic Techniques by Lark Press
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Japanese Wood-Fired Ceramics by Marc Lancet
Marc Lancet’s Japanese Wood-Fired Ceramics reads less like a technical manual and more like a close, sustained meditation on a living craft. The book invites the reader into the humid, smoky hinterlands of Japanese kiln culture — into the pungent vocabulary of ash, flame, and clay — and does so with a critic’s attention to … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Japanese Wood-Fired Ceramics by Marc Lancet
The New Renaissance Mindset 