Five Cubed

In 1939, Fortune Magazine ran an article on ceramics titled The art with an inferiority complex. Fast forward to 1961 and Rose Slivka proclaimed that ceramics had “broken new ground and challenged past traditions, suggested new meanings and possibilities to old functions and habits of seeing, and has won the startled attention of a world unprepared for the expected.”¹

Indeed a great deal had changed in the intervening years; in late 1940s Japan the revolutionary artists of the Sodeisha Group radically challenged the conventional thinking, embedded in tradition, that had existed in ceramic art, while in the US groundbreaking artists such as Peter Voulkos and Jim Leedy emerged in the 1950s opening the door for future generations. This led to a view that, as In the UK during this period the towering figures of Bernard Leach and Hans Coper still loomed large, creating an environment in which, as Martina Margetts once observed, “eloquence triumphed over eclecticism.”