Out of Round

The Studio Pottery Movement constitutes the emergence of fine art ambitions within the craft discipline of ceramics. In other words, it represents the potter’s struggle between artistic liberty and conformity to tradition. Out of Round, my MFA research project at the Royal College of Art, offers both an appraisal and revision of this movement and that of its legacy.

This movement is best characterized in the diverging practices of William Staite Murray and Bernard Leach, both living and working around the turn of the 20th century in modernized England. Murray pioneered a fine art approach for his ceramics practice, selling his expressive pots to collectors within London’s commercial gallery setting. Leach, on the other hand, sustained the classical craft model, training apprentices to produce standard wares at his studio in St. Ives. His noble craft was made accessible to all people for everyday use.

Today, Bernard Leach is recognized as the Father of the British Studio Movement. Murray’s efforts to raise pottery’s prestige produced a lineage of more experimental though less accessible offshoots—both in financial and aesthetic terms. By contrast, Leach’s traditional forms were widely admired, even perhaps bolstered by Murray’s fine art advocacy. With fame, however, Leach’s utilitarian pots have become too precious for use. The works of many Studio Potters have likewise become flattened by the collector market.