Porcelain

Book excerpt: What motivates and inspires the finest porcelain artists working today? Forty internationally celebrated masters reveal their secrets, explaining just how they work with this incredibly demanding ceramic material, prized for its pristine beauty. Pure white and wonderfully delicate, porcelain is what clay potters usually graduate to only after years of honing their skills. This diverse collection showcases the results of that dedication, and the versatility is simply breathtaking: Claire Curneen presents highly emotive, tactile figurative forms. Edmund de Waal’s elegant celadon site-specific vessel installations are renowned for their meditative presence. Harlan House’s finely carved vessels take inspiration from nature's organic forms, while Bodil Manz's eggshell porcelain cylinders are so translucent that you can sometimes discern light and shadow passing through the walls of his pots.