Ceramics

We live in a state of divorce from an entire world of sensation

ultimate ‘compost’ from which scientific abstractions spring. It is in the realm of these submerged memory-traces that creative art moves, bringing them into the orbit of everyday life and making them available to the experience of others by formalizing and projecting them on to elements of the familiar world which can receive and transmit them. From the artist's side the projection is done by his activity in shaping and forming. From the spectator's side it must be done by active ‘reading’ of the artist's forms.
What this art and its ‘reading’ depend on is the human analogizing faculty which lies at the root of all our mental achievements. It is probable that when our memory records an experience it recognizes also its analogical resemblance to other experiences of a similar kind and ‘accepts’ it under the heading of a ‘form’. It may also record connections between experiences, many of which may seem to be of different orders or from different sense-fields, crossing the boundaries between the accepted categories of the world, as when it recognizes that a certain splash resembles a flash, a rose petal resembles a cheek, or a plant stem in spring a burning fuse. The textured bodies and coloured shapes the potter makes can thus suggest very remote indescribable intuitions. By projecting into one pot different

MEMORY-TRACES AND MEANING
The basis of expression in ceramics—as in the other arts—is the way the forms of a pot implicate in their presence a wide range of the spectator's personal experience. Different traditions operate in different ways, giving weight to different aspects; but, broadly speaking, one may define the roots of artistic meaning as follows.1
As we live our lives we accumulate a fund of memory-traces based on our sensory experience. These remain in our minds charged, it seems, with vestiges of the emotions which accompanied the original experiences. The overwhelming majority of those experiences belong within the realm of sensuous life, and may never reach the sphere of word formation or what are usually regarded as concepts at all. And yet they probably provide the essential continuum from which evolves everyone's sense of the world and consistent reality, everyone's understanding of what it means to exist, and are even the ultimate

The problems, in our culture, will be not only to prevent the adults those children become from falling back and accepting passively products devoid of authentic imagery, but also, what is more difficult, to prevent their falling victims to any type of mock-primitive ceramics, mass-produced expressly to capture the ‘back to the materials’ market

It is nowadays fatally easy for practising potters brought up in this atmosphere to allow their attitudes to be so far influenced by this cult that they are blinded to the real value of the transformation images embodied in some of the best fine porcelains. It is all a question of the relative balance among the elements in the image.

the Japanese ceramics made for the tea-ceremony