The Ceramic Narrative

Publishers: A&C Black, London (2006),
University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, USA (2006)

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.

Chapter One explores the narrative imagery of the great Attic vase painters of ancient Greece; Chapter Two examines the ceramic imagery of the Maya culture; Chapter Three looks at the ceramics of China, Persia and Japan; Chapter Four presents an in-depth study of narrative European tin-glaze traditions; and Chapter Five examines the narrative imagery occurring on later European porcelains.

Matthias Ostermann attempts wherever possible not only to present these works in the context of their cultural and historical backgrounds, but also to refer to some of the oral and text sources that may have inspired these pictorial ceramic narratives.

Applied arts writer David Whiting from the United Kingdom further presents a cogent analysis of the development of ceramic narratives in the 20th century in Chapter Six, and the remaining six chapters present the work of eighty contemporary international ceramic artists whose works explore the narrative in a number of different ways. These include the exploration of mythologies and existing story archetypes; re-shaped icons and new idioms; personal visions, private stories and memory; the human figure, and our portrayal of it in terms of aspirations, relationships and identity; political and social commentary dealing with such issues as gender politics; and finally, the ceramic object itself, seen as message and metaphor.
It is the author's hope that this book will serve as a beginning for further study of this fascinating and little-explored subject, and that it will be seen as a celebration of the work of all ceramic artists, whose passion is the ceramic narrative.