Alison Britton - Seeing Things: Collected Writing on Art, Craft and Design - Occasional Papers 2023

‘I have been an admirer of Alison’s work since she was a student at the RCA many years ago, and today the special qualities of her work – both authoritative and relaxed – I still find raising to the spirits.’ Quentin Blake
Alison Britton’s collected writings review the unstable place of craft in the spectrum of art and design. Now in a second edition, the essays included in Seeing Things reveal that ceramics, her central concern, is an exploratory field that reflects on itself, in dialogue with many other areas of inquiry such as gender and cultural studies.
Britton, one of today’s leading ceramicists and a critical writer, has chosen a range of her texts from catalogue essays to exhibition leaflets and reviews, demonstrating a persistent desire to test the boundaries of practice. Her sensibility to formal concerns and evolving ideas about objects over the past forty years makes this book essential for fellow ceramicists and anyone interested in the role of materiality and making in the broader cultural field.