Ceramic art

Such crafts emphasized traditional non-industrial production techniques, faithfulness to the material, the skills of the individual maker, attention to utility, and an absence of excessive decoration that was typical to the Victorian era.

The toughness, strength and translucence of porcelain, relative to other types of pottery, arises mainly from vitrification and the formation of the mineral mullite within the body at these high temperatures.

Properties associated with porcelain include low permeability and elasticity; considerable strength, hardness, toughness, whiteness, translucency and resonance; and a high resistance to chemical attack and thermal shock.

[19] Slipware is a type of pottery identified by its primary decorating process where slip is placed onto the leather-hard clay body surface before firing by dipping, painting or splashing.

[20] In sharp contrast to the archaeological usage, in which the term terra sigillata refers to a whole class of pottery, in contemporary ceramic art, 'terra sigillata' describes only a watery refined slip used to facilitate the burnishing of raw clay surfaces and used to promote carbon smoke effects, in both primitive low temperature firing techniques and unglazed alternative western-style Raku firing techniques.

A tile is a manufactured piece of hard-wearing material such as ceramic, stone, metal, or even glass, generally used for covering roofs, floors, walls, showers, or other objects such as tabletops.

Alternatively, tile can sometimes refer to similar units made from lightweight materials such as perlite, wood, and mineral wool, typically used for wall and ceiling applications.

For example, Middle Eastern, Indian or Polynesian food culture and cuisine sometimes limits tableware to serving dishes, using bread or leaves as individual plates.

Around 8000 BC, several early settlements became experts in crafting beautiful and highly sophisticated containers from stone, using materials such as alabaster or granite, and employing sand to shape and polish.

Glazed and coloured bricks were used to make low reliefs in Ancient Mesopotamia, most famously the Ishtar Gate of Babylon (c. 575 BCE), now partly reconstructed in Berlin, with sections elsewhere.

[35][36] Transmitted via Islamic Iberia, a new tradition of Azulejos developed in Spain and especially Portugal, which by the Baroque period produced extremely large painted scenes on tiles, usually in blue and white.

[32][33] Recent archaeological excavations at Angkor Borei (in southern Cambodia) have recovered a large number of ceramics, some of which probably date back to the prehistoric period.

Glazed wares first appear in the archaeological record at the end of the 9th century at the Roluos temple group in the Angkor region, where green-glazed pot shards have been found.

The wide range of utilitarian shapes suggest the Khmers used ceramics in their daily life for cooking, food preservation, carrying and storing liquids, as containers for medicinal herbs, perfumes and cosmetics.

The potter's wheel and a kiln capable of reaching higher temperatures and firing stoneware appeared in the 3rd or 4th centuries CE, probably brought from China via the Korean peninsula.

The Japanese overlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi's attempts to conquer China in the 1590s were dubbed the "Ceramic Wars";[citation needed] the emigration of Korean potters appeared to be a major cause.

[43] From the 8th to 18th centuries, glazed ceramics was important in Islamic art, usually in the form of elaborate pottery,[44] developing on vigorous Persian and Egyptian pre-Islamic traditions in particular.

[47] The albarello form, a type of maiolica earthenware jar originally designed to hold apothecaries' ointments and dry drugs, was first made in the Islamic Middle East.

Ancient Roman pottery, such as Samian ware, was rarely as fine, and largely copied shapes from metalwork, but was produced in enormous quantities, and is found all over Europe and the Middle East, and beyond.

Few vessels of great artistic interest have survived, but there are very many small figures, often incorporated into oil lamps or similar objects, and often with religious or erotic themes (or both together – a Roman speciality).

Tin-glazed pottery was taken up in the Netherlands from the 16th to the 18th centuries, the potters making household, decorative pieces and tiles in vast numbers,[51] usually with blue painting on a white ground.

As well as tableware, early European porcelain revived the taste for purely decorative figures of people or animals, which had also been a feature of several ancient cultures, often as grave goods.

His work was of very high quality: when visiting his workshop, if he saw an offending vessel that failed to meet with his standards, he would smash it with his stick, exclaiming, "This will not do for Josiah Wedgwood!"

The development of machine made thinner printing papers around 1804 allowed the engravers to use a much wider variety of tonal techniques which became capable of being reproduced on the ware, much more successfully.

Studio pottery is made by artists working alone or in small groups, producing unique items or short runs, typically with all stages of manufacture carried out by one individual.

Fritschs' ceramic vessels broke away from traditional methods and she developed a hand built flattened coil technique in stoneware smoothed and refined into accurately profiled forms.

This colorful tradition in ceramics and textiles was followed by the Nazca culture (1–600 CE), whose potters developed improved techniques for preparing clay and for decorating objects, using fine brushes to paint sophisticated motifs.

The Moche cultures (1–800 CE) that flourished on the northern coast of modern Peru produced modelled clay sculptures and effigies decorated with fine lines of red on a beige background.

As evidence of the extent to which these ceramic art works were prized, many specimens traced to Lubaantun have been found at distant Maya sites in Honduras and Guatemala.

In the early 20th century Martinez and her husband Julian rediscovered the method of creating traditional San Ildefonso Pueblo Black-on Black pottery.