The Art of Pottery

Pottery is one of the most durable forms of art, with fragments dating back millennia from almost all cultures. It is also among the most versatile. Ceramics can be sculpted, molded, draped, rolled, coiled and shaped to create an endless array of shapes, colors, and textures. Clay, the material for pottery, has two distinctive properties: it is plastic—meaning that it can be molded to retain the shape imposed on it; and it becomes hardened when fired at high temperatures—a process called sintering—which alters its chemical and physical characteristics.

Some potters work by hand, forming their creations by kneading the clay and pressing it into shapes. Others work on a potter’s wheel, using a process called throwing to produce vessels of a uniform size and shape. The potter’s wheel rotates while a solid ball of soft clay is pressed, squeezed and pulled gently upwards and outwards to form a hollow shape. The skill and experience required to master this technique make it a highly-prized skill in the art of pottery.

Kathy Butterly’s work often uses classic ceramic forms as a starting point. However, she distorts and misforms them in ways that suggest iconoclastic and evocative responses. She then glazes them, often with hues and combinations that are both enticing and startling. In her hands, the vessel becomes a canvas on which she expresses a range of ideas from materiality to line and to history.

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