Ceramic Artists with Distinctive Approaches to Form

The self-styled Mad Potter of Biloxi threw vessels with walls as thin as eggshell and then crumpled, pinched, twisted and folded them while the clay was still wet, so a vase looks as if it has been squeezed in a fist. Few collectors understood it in the 1890s, and Ohr stored thousands of pots in his Mississippi workshop rather than sell them cheaply. Rediscovered in the late 1960s, the work now reads as a forecast of abstract sculpture in clay. Look for the ruffled rims and the snake-like handles he added for fun.

From 1947 Picasso spent years at the Madoura pottery in Vallauris, run by Suzanne and Georges Ramié, and made thousands of pieces there. His approach was to treat a pot as a body: a jug becomes a woman by pinching in a waist, a vase sprouts a bird's head, a plate turns into a bullring or a face. The Ramiés' throwers, notably Jules Agard, made many of the forms he then reshaped and painted, and the workshop produced licensed editions of his designs. It is the most playful corner of his work.

Rosanjin was a cook and restaurateur before he was a potter, and he made dishes to frame food. At his Hoshigaoka Saryo club in Tokyo in the 1920s he served on ceramics he designed after old Oribe, Shino and Kutani wares: square plates with green glaze poured across one corner, leaf-shaped dishes, bowls deliberately off-round. Skilled craftsmen in his kilns at Kita-Kamakura threw much of the work, which he then decorated and finished. Look at how each piece leaves space for what will sit on it.

Leach's ideal was the humble, useful pot, thrown quickly and well and fired in a wood-burning climbing kiln, with sturdy forms and quiet glazes such as tenmoku and celadon. He learned in Japan alongside friends of the mingei folk-craft movement, then founded the Leach Pottery at St Ives in 1920 with Shoji Hamada. His A Potter's Book of 1940 became the studio potter's bible. Much of the pottery's everyday standard ware was made by its team, including his son David Leach and later his third wife Janet Leach.

Martinez coiled her pots by hand, without a wheel, at San Ildefonso Pueblo in New Mexico, then polished them with smooth stones until they shone. Around 1919 she and her husband Julian developed black-on-black ware: Julian painted designs in a matte slip on the burnished surface, and smothering the firing with dung turned the whole pot black, so the pattern shows only as a change from gloss to matt. It was a family practice from start to finish, later continued by her son Popovi Da and grandson Tony Da, and it revived the pueblo's pottery economy.

A founder of the mingei folk-craft movement with Yanagi Sōetsu and Shoji Hamada, Kawai began with refined copies of Chinese and Korean glazes, then grew freer and stranger. His later pieces, made at the home and climbing kiln in Kyoto that is now his memorial museum, are thick-walled, press-moulded and asymmetric, with splashed glazes of copper red, iron and cobalt, and some look more like sculpture than vessels. He refused national honours, including Living National Treasure status. The Kyoto house shows the workshop and kiln exactly as his family kept it.

Wood took up pottery in her forties after a youth among the Dada artists of New York, and became famous for lustre glazes: iridescent surfaces in gold, copper and violet that change colour as you walk round a bowl or chalice. She admitted her throwing was wobbly and turned that into charm, alongside cheeky figurative pieces that mock respectable society. She studied with Glen Lukens and with Gertrud and Otto Natzler, and worked in her studio at Ojai, California, until shortly before her death at 105 in 1998.

Hamada decorated with gestures. His best-known trick was to pour a ladle of glaze across a bowl in one sweep, a pattern taking about 15 seconds, and when asked whether that was too quick for the price he said it had taken 60 years and 15 seconds. He settled in the pottery village of Mashiko, worked with its local clay, glazes and craftsmen, and fired a large climbing kiln with neighbours' help. Co-founder of the Leach Pottery at St Ives, he was named one of Japan's first Living National Treasures in 1955.

Cliff's Bizarre ware, launched in 1927 at the Wilkinson factory in Stoke-on-Trent, put Art Deco on the tea table: thick blocks of orange, yellow and green, crocuses and stylised cottages, and angular shapes such as the Conical sugar sifter and the flat-sided Stamford teapot. She started as an apprentice gilder, and her manager Colley Shorter backed her experiments. The painting was done freehand by a team of young women decorators, the Bizarre girls, whose quick brushwork gives each piece its life.

Cardew made slipware for ordinary kitchens at Winchcombe in the Cotswolds, generous jugs and dishes trailed with honey-coloured slip, and then moved to West Africa and switched to high-fired stoneware. As the colonial government's pottery officer he founded the Abuja Pottery Training Centre in northern Nigeria in 1952, where trainees combined local hand-building traditions with the wheel and glazes. Its most famous potter was Ladi Kwali. Look at the bellied, robust forms in both phases: Cardew valued vigour over polish, and his book Pioneer Pottery became a manual for potters worldwide.

Rie's bowls flare from a tiny foot to a wide, razor-thin rim, like an opening flower, and her bottles stretch tall with flattened lips. She brought Viennese modernism to London as a refugee in 1938, and her habit of applying raw glaze straight onto unfired pots and firing once gave her pitted, volcanic surfaces and fine sgraffito lines scratched through manganese. In her Albion Mews workshop she made ceramic buttons for fashion houses during and after the war, and Hans Coper, who joined her in 1946 to help with them, became her closest colleague.

Duckworth refused the distinction between pot and sculpture. Her tiny pinched porcelain forms, folded like petals or shells and often unglazed white, sit at one end of her work; at the other are large stoneware murals such as Earth, Water and Sky, made for the University of Chicago's geophysics building in 1968. A German-Jewish refugee who trained in Liverpool and London, she moved to Chicago in 1964 and stayed. Look for the way she lets a fold or a single cut edge carry a whole piece.

Coper threw separate sections on the wheel and joined them into composite forms: spade shapes, cycladic figures, thistle-like vessels balanced on narrow stems. The surfaces are rubbed and layered with manganese and white slip until they look like weathered stone rather than glaze. A German refugee with no craft training, he learned in Lucie Rie's workshop from 1946 and later taught at Camberwell and the Royal College of Art, where students including Elizabeth Fritsch and Alison Britton passed through. His six huge candlesticks stand on the altar of Coventry Cathedral.

Takaezu closed her pots. From the late 1950s she threw rounded forms and sealed the tops, leaving only a pinhole, so they became moons, gourds and human-height columns with a hidden interior; before closing some, she dropped in a small clay bead so the pot rattles when moved. The glazes are poured and brushed like abstract painting across the curves. Born in Hawaii to Japanese immigrant parents, she taught for decades at Princeton and at her home studio in New Jersey, where students helped load and fire her large kilns.

Voulkos attacked clay like an Abstract Expressionist painter. His stacked stoneware towers of the late 1950s and his later wood-fired stacks and plates are slashed, gouged, torn and punctured with holes, the marks of the process left fully visible. At the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles from 1954, and then at Berkeley, he ran a studio as a free-for-all where students including John Mason, Ken Price and Paul Soldner worked alongside him through the night, and that group shifted American ceramics from craft into sculpture.

Kwali learned to coil large water jars from her aunt in the Gwari village of Kwali, building them by hand and beating them into shape before incising lizards, fish and scorpions into the surface. When she joined Michael Cardew's Abuja Pottery Training Centre in 1954, she carried those hand-built forms into glazed, high-fired stoneware, and the combination made her internationally famous through exhibitions in London. She later demonstrated across the United States and Europe. Her face appears on the Nigerian 20 naira note, a rare honour for any potter.

Woodman began as a production potter in Boulder, Colorado, and spent her career pulling the functional vase apart. Her Pillow Pitchers and her later triptychs flatten vessels into silhouettes, attach painted clay wings and set them against painted wall panels, so a vase becomes half sculpture, half picture of a vase. Influenced by Italian majolica and Matisse, she split her time between Colorado, New York and Antella near Florence. In 2006 she became the first living woman artist, and first ceramicist, given a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Price's later sculptures are lumpy, biomorphic blobs that look molten or alive, but their skins are the real subject: he painted them with up to dozens of thin layers of acrylic and then sanded back through them, so each surface shimmers with speckles of every colour underneath. A member of Peter Voulkos's Otis circle, he moved from bright egg-shaped pieces and cups in the 1960s to these forms, made mostly in Taos, New Mexico. Look closely at a surface and count the hidden layers.

Fritsch coils her pots and then flattens them, so a vase seen from the front looks fully rounded and from the side is barely a few centimetres deep. The illusion is completed by painted slip patterns of grids, stripes and tilted planes that play tricks with perspective, and she often groups pots so they seem to converse. A Welsh-born former harpist, she studied under Hans Coper at the Royal College of Art and has said music shapes her rhythms. Walk round one and watch it collapse from volume into a drawing.

Odundo's vessels are hand-coiled, never thrown, and burnished for hours until they gleam like polished metal; a second firing with reduced oxygen turns some from terracotta orange to deep black. The forms swell and lean like bodies, with necks that tilt off-centre and lugs like ears or topknots. She learned hand-building from Gwari potters, including Ladi Kwali's circle, at Abuja in Nigeria and from potters in Kenya and New Mexico. The Hepworth Wakefield's 2019 exhibition, which she curated around her own work, is a model of how to show clay.

A Scottish potter trained at the Edinburgh College of Art, Lee builds her quiet, slightly asymmetric pots by pinching and coiling, then scrapes and burnishes them smooth. She uses no glaze: the colour is in the clay itself, mixed with metal oxides so that speckled bands, halos and tidemarks run through the body of the pot. Every piece takes weeks, and the subtle lean of a rim or a single drifting band is the whole drama. She has been making work this way for more than 40 years from her London studio.

Ai's Sunflower Seeds, poured across the floor of Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in 2010, looked like a grey carpet until you knelt down: about 100 million porcelain husks, each sculpted and hand-painted individually by some 1,600 craftspeople in Jingdezhen, the city that made imperial porcelain for a thousand years. The form is a single seed repeated to the point of a landscape, and its meaning sits in the labour. His earlier works with clay, such as dropping a Han dynasty urn or dipping ancient vases in industrial paint, ask what we value in old pots.

Perry chose the classical urn precisely because it looked polite, then covered it in uncomfortable stories. His coil-built pots carry sgraffito drawings, photo transfers, handwritten slogans and gold lustre, and their subjects range from class and masculinity to his own childhood and his teddy bear Alan Measles. Up close the busy, layered surfaces reward reading like a comic. He won the Turner Prize in 2003 as the first ceramicist to do so, and his television work has made him one of Britain's best-known explainers of art and taste.

De Waal throws thin, pale porcelain cylinders and then arranges dozens or hundreds of them in vitrines, on shelves and in glass cabinets, so the work is about rhythm and interval, like music, rather than the single pot. Barely different glazes in white, celadon and black make you slow down. He trained through an apprenticeship with Geoffrey Whiting, a Leach follower, and worked in Japan; his studio team in south London now helps with the large installations. His family memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes, about a collection of netsuke, made him a bestselling writer too.