Centre for Ceramics Research

Cardiff School of Art and Design has been educating practitioners, teachers and other professionals in the discipline of ceramics since the early 1950s, and now offers programmes at all levels: from undergraduate and taught masters, to M.Phil and PhD research degrees.

The School's Centre for Ceramics Studies has an almost equally long engagement with research in ceramics, which now covers many aspects of practice in the discipline, including the theorising of artists' creative practices, and the history of studio ceramics. The outcomes from this research and its dissemination through journals and the conferences, symposiums and scholarly exhibitions held by the Centre, will be increasingly available to all involved in the field of ceramics, through the internet.

Students and researchers are located in an extensive range of studios and specialist workshops, with ready access to technical data and a large library collection and the subject, thus creating a rich, stimulating and vibrant environment for the discussion and debate of ideas and the sharing of knowledge and experience.

Ceramics and Sculpture:
Different Disciplines and Shared Concerns

A Call for Papers for a One-Day Conference to be held in Cardiff at
Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales, 5 July 2012

Background
Relationships between ceramics and sculpture are a focus for research at Cardiff School of Art and Design. This research has demonstrated that the interests of studio ceramicists and sculptors in Britain either overlapped or came into particularly sharp focus at certain periods during the last century or so. The Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, has in the last few years awarded research fellowships to explore such relationships and one outcome was the exhibition A Rough Equivalent, curated by Dr Jeffrey Jones in 2010. Both ceramics and sculpture now have to make a case for their survival as discrete disciplines within higher education and, increasingly within the arts, categories are blurred. Recently an issue of Interpreting Ceramics was devoted to interdisciplinary approaches in American ceramics and the 2012 issue of the journal will address relationships between ceramics and sculpture. Against this background the conference seeks to illuminate shared concerns by examining points of formal, conceptual, theoretical and material convergences between the two disciplines, while also addressing key points of difference.

Scope
The conference conveners welcome a variety of papers that engage with the encounter between ceramics and sculpture. The terms ‘ceramics' and ‘sculpture' are intended to be interpreted broadly and include vessels, figurative work, collaborative work, installation and performance. Papers representing new research are particularly welcome and authors are invited to submit proposals based on, but not limited to, the following themes:

• Contextual grounding for the relationships between ceramics and sculpture.

• Materials and processes.

• Formal and conceptual language.

• The role of education.

• The role of curatorial practice in making relationships between ceramics and sculpture manifest.

• Institutional cultures.

• Case studies of individual artists, movements, debates etc.

• The iconography of the artist in the studio.

 Submission, Presentation and Publication of Papers in Interpreting Ceramics

• Proposals for papers (300 words) accompanied by short biographies of the authors (150 words) should be submitted by 31st January 2012 in ‘Word' format.

• All successful papers will be included in a special issue of Interpreting Ceramics to be published in conjunction with the conference.

• A number of slots will be available for presentations on the day of the conference. However it will be possible to publish additional papers in Interpreting Ceramics. If potential authors are unable to attend the conference (for example, international contributors) then ‘publication only' submissions will be accepted. 

• A detailed schedule for the submission, presentation and publication of the papers is available for potential authors and enquiries should be made by to Angie Dutton.

The conference is an initiative of Cardiff School of Art and Design (Cardiff Metropolitan University, UWIC) and Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales. Collaborative partners are Interpreting Ceramics; Welsh Institute for Research in Art and Design (WIRAD); National Centre for Ceramics in Wales.