Ceramic Narrative

by Matthias Ostermann

Hardcover: 224 pages
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press (2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0-8122-3970-9
ISBN-13: 978-0-8122-3970-6
Dimensions: 11.1" x 8.9" x 0.9"
Shipping Weight: 2.66 lbs.

The Ceramic Narrative is an exploration of past and present ceramic iconography concerned with the depiction of narratives, or with images meant to be thought-provoking, beyond the merely decorative. The book is beautifully illustrated with an extensive variety of work from history and the present day, showing how contemporary artists continue this tradition with modern interpretations.

The first five chapters look at the way narrative imagery has been used throughout history, examining ancient Greece, the ceramic imagery of the Maya culture, the ceramics of China, Persia, and Japan, European tin-glaze traditions, and the narrative imagery appearing on later European porcelains. Matthias Ostermann attempts where possible not only to present these works in their cultural and historical context, but also to refer to some of the older myths and sources that may have inspired these pictorial ceramic narratives.

Applied arts writer David Whiting contributes an essay on the development of ceramic narratives in the twentieth century in Chapter Six, and the remaining six chapters present the work of more than 75 contemporary international ceramic artists whose works explore the narrative in a number of different ways. These include the exploration of mythologies and existing stories; personal visions, private stories, and memory; the human figure relationships, and identity; political and social commentary; and finally the ceramic object itself, seen as message and metaphor.

This book will serve as a beginning for further study of this fascinating and little-explored subject, and as a celebration of the work of all ceramic artists, whose passion is the ceramic narrative.