New Wave Clay unpicks the zeitgeist and aesthetic of an exciting discipline with intelligence, insight and indulgence. Against the backdrop of the digital age and shiny screens, a whole new generation of craftspeople, designers and artists are realizing the pleasure of working with clay and bringing a fresh perspective to the material. Today, there is a lively crossover between craft, design, sculpture and technology that is rethinking ceramics: what you can make with it, what it looks like and who makes it. New Wave Clay is a global survey of 55 imaginative ceramicists that are leading this craft revival. They include classically trained potters who create design-led pieces, product designers who use clay as a means of creative expression, as well as fine artists, architects, decorators, illustrators, sculptors and graphic designers. Their collective output goes far beyond pots into ceramic furniture, sculpture, murals, wall reliefs, small-scale architecture and 3D printing. The book is divided into four thematic sections and features special contributions from Edmund de Waal, Hella Jongerius, Grayson Perry, Martin Brudnizki and Sarah Griffin discussing craft, industry, ornament, decorating and collecting. New Wave Clay is an image-led, dynamic study of the exciting new generation jumpstarting this age-old art. Features - A 296-page survey of 55 international ceramicists who bridge the worlds of product design, interiors, fine art and luxury craftsmanship. - Four thematic chapters are accompanied by interviews and written contributions on the subject from designers, decorators and collectors. - Richly illustrated, New Wave Clay is an image-led, dynamic book that aims to demonstrate the contemporary condition of this age-old art. - Instead of focusing on traditional craft ware and functional pieces, this title focuses on the community of ceramicists who create design-led works.

New York is a centre of creative production for an exciting, emerging generation of women artists. Their work investigates themes such as the body as medium and subject matter; the deconstruction of the existing patriarchal order of the art world; the appropriation of earlier art historical references; and the use of so-called abject and everyday materials. New York New Wave investigates the relevance of earlier feminist practice for this 'new' generation, asking: Does gender difference still play a role in today's practice? How can younger women artists embrace a radical political ideology and yet remain market friendly? How far have these artists diverged from the established feminist "tradition"? Artists discussed include: Firelei Baez, EV Day, Ruby LaToya Fraser, Diana Al-Hadid, K8 Hardy, Valerie Hegarty, Cindy Hinant, Dawn Kasper, Anya Kielar, Liz Magic Laser, Narcissister, Alix Pearlstein, Aurel Schmidt, AL Steiner and W.A.G.E.

Why do so many contemporary Chinese artists use porcelain in their work? In New Export China, Alex Burchmore presents a deep dive into a unique genre of ceramic art to describe a framework for a broader art practice. Focusing on the work of four artists from the 1990s through the 2010s—Liu Jianhua, Ai Weiwei, Ah Xian, and Sin-ying Ho—Burchmore reveals how the materiality of ceramics has been used to highlight China’s role in global trade and to explore the function of this medium as a vessel for the transmission of Chinese art, culture, and ideas. From its historical pedigree and transcultural relevance to its material allure and anthropomorphic resonance, porcelain offers artists a unique way to move between the global and the intimate, the mass produced and the handmade, and the foreign and the domestic. By dissecting both the legacy of porcelain export and current networks of exchange, Burchmore ultimately demonstrates why this ceramic practice is crucial to understanding the development of Chinese contemporary art.

In his major new history, Paul Greenhalgh tells the story of ceramics as a story of human civilisation, from the Ancient Greeks to the present day. As a core craft technology, pottery has underpinned domesticity, business, religion, recreation, architecture, and art for millennia. Indeed, the history of ceramics parallels the development of human society. This fascinating and very human history traces the story of ceramic art and industry from the Ancient Greeks to the Romans and the medieval world; Islamic ceramic cultures and their influence on the Italian Renaissance; Chinese and European porcelain production; modernity and Art Nouveau; the rise of the studio potter, Art Deco, International Style and Mid-Century Modern, and finally, the contemporary explosion of ceramic making and the postmodern potter. Interwoven in this journey through time and place is the story of the pots themselves, the culture of the ceramics, and their character and meaning. Ceramics have had a presence in virtually every country and historical period, and have worked as a commodity servicing every social class. They are omnipresent: a ubiquitous art. Ceramic culture is a clear, unique, definable thing, and has an internal logic that holds it together through millennia. Hence ceramics is the most peculiar and extraordinary of all the arts. At once cheap, expensive, elite, plebeian, high-tech, low-tech, exotic, eccentric, comic, tragic, spiritual, and secular, it has revealed itself to be as fluid as the mud it is made from. Ceramics are the very stuff of how civilized life was, and is, led. This then is the story of human society's most surprising core causes and effects.