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 – 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 – 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 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 Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Lowlife Paradise: The Works of Glenn Barr by La Luz de Jesus & Last Gasp
Lowlife Paradise: The Works of Glenn Barr arrives, for readers and viewers alike, as more than a catalogue raisonné or a retrospective: it is a focused attempt to translate a restless, pictorial imagination into the language of the book. Glenn Barr’s work—at once cartoonish and baroque, playful and implacably strange—resists tidy taxonomies; this volume, by … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Lowlife Paradise: The Works of Glenn Barr by La Luz de Jesus & Last Gasp
The New Renaissance Mindset 