Kristin Müller’s Potter’s Studio Handbook is the sort of practical-intellectual hybrid that appears, at first glance, to belong strictly to the bench: measured lists, sequences of photographs, and angled hands shaping clay. Read closely, however, it reveals itself as a small pedagogical manifesto — a sustained argument about how technique, habit, and deliberate constraints generate … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Potter’s Studio Handbook by Kristin Müller
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Penland Book of Ceramics: Master Classes in Ceramic Techniques edited by Deborah Morgenthal and Suzanne J. E. Tourtillott
The Penland Book of Ceramics reads like a field diary kept at the intersection of craft pedagogy and artistic confession. Edited by Deborah Morgenthal and Suzanne J. E. Tourtillott and assembled from the teaching tradition of the Penland School of Crafts, this handsome volume (Lark Books, 2003) aims not simply to catalogue techniques but to … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Penland Book of Ceramics: Master Classes in Ceramic Techniques edited by Deborah Morgenthal and Suzanne J. E. Tourtillott
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 … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Slab-Built Ceramics by Coll Minogue
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Surface Design for Ceramics by Maureen Mills
Maureen Mills’s Surface Design for Ceramics reads like a compact manifesto for the small, concentrated art of ornamentation — not a polemic but a pedagogy: a careful, image-rich argument that the surface of a vessel is not mere decoration appended to a form but an active partner in meaning-making. Presented as one of the practical … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Surface Design for Ceramics by Maureen Mills
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Picasso: Painter and Sculptor in Clay by Marilyn McCully
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 – The Essential Guide to Mold Making & Slip Casting by Andrew Martin
Andrew Martin’s The Essential Guide to Mold Making & Slip Casting stakes a clear claim to usefulness: it is a book written by a practitioner for practitioners, and it reads that way—methodical, economy-minded, and exquisitely practical. But what elevates this manual beyond a mere how-to compendium is the way the author balances procedural exactitude with … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Essential Guide to Mold Making & Slip Casting by Andrew Martin
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 – 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 – 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 New Renaissance Mindset 