Urban Potters: Makers in the City

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This cookie is used to record what callouts have been dismissed during a session to ensure they do not re-appear. The Urban Potter teaches you how to make beautiful, one-off handcrafted pieces with simple, natural shapes and neutral tones. Ceramicist Emily Proctor's unique, self-taught style embraces irregularity and asymmetry - here, there is no such thing as perfection, every piece is created through an authentic, intuitive process, with no wheel required.

Early man discovered the power of fire to harden earth into a durable material as long as 25,000 years ago – probably while placing clay figures into fires as part of ritual practices or lining hearths with clay to keep them watertight – but it wasn’t until our nomadic ancestors started to settle into towns and villages 13,000 years later that ceramics started to be used as functional vessels.Discover the slow, tactile art of hand-building ceramics and express yourself through the act of creating unique, timeless pieces for your home. Meanwhile American, Australian and Brazilian potters adopted approaches from Europe and Japan, and combined them with their own cultures and experiences to create new forms of expression. As well as giving insight into handmade ceramics into the various cities, the book also includes a practical source list of places to buy handmade pottery in the six cities featured. Daily updates on the latest design and architecture vacancies advertised on Dezeen Jobs. Plus occasional news. Dezeen Jobs Weekly

Editor of Crafts magazine Grant Gibson cites more expansive reasons for the current resurgence of craft, including increasingly risk-adverse manufacturers driving new designers to find their own routes to market, a recession-driven ‘make do and mend’ culture and conversely the rise of ‘an uber-rich class’ in cities such as London providing a market for expensive one-off pieces, together with the ‘intellectual boost’ provided by publications such as The Craftsman by Richard Sennet, Matthew Crawford ’s The Case for Working With Your Hands, and The Hare With The Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal, alongside exhibitions such as The Power of Making at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in2011. Any cancellation made less than 48hrs will result in a cancellation fee. The amount of the fee will be equal to 50% of the amount paid for any Friday Night Throw Down and Private Lessons. Please note that we will do our best to work with you to reschedule. The Industrial Revolution transformed ceramics and divided production in two – the large scale mass-manufacture of ceramic ware in response to the demands of population growth, the new popularity of tea, and the expansion of the British Empire; and the small-scale studio pottery that is the focus of this book, defined for our purposes as functional ware made by a single person. And that patience may be starting to pay off. Tanya Harrod argues that fired, glazed clay, long neglected by art critics and historians, is finally starting to get the recognition it deserves: ‘In this brave new world, Grayson Perry’s 2003 Turner Prize, bestowed upon a room full of pots, signifies a change of heart, an abandonment of the fustian hierarchies that have marginalised ceramics.’ Although she does point out, quite rightly, that this attention all-to-often seems to be focused on male artists, rather then the usually female craftspeople who make their work, or indeed studio potters. The book also maps out the shift from the standardisation and mass-manufacturing of pottery, to the revived interest in handmade ceramics – which has seen Turner prize-winning Assemble "squish" coloured clays to create one-of-a-kind products, and Alissa Volchkova create porcelain bowls that look like paint blobs.News about our Dezeen Awards programme, including entry deadlines and announcements. Plus occasional updates. Dezeen Events Guide

Points of View, by Geoffrey Quilley, Standpoint, London / Ceramics: Art and Perception International, issue 60

Private lesson pricing is tiered. If your group size changes from when you originally booked, you are expected to pay the price-per-person of your actual group size. These movements were a rejection, not only of industrialisation, but also of the cities where industrialisation took place. Writing in 20th Century Ceramics, Edmund de Waal asserts, Katie Treggiden is a design writer, editor, curator, lecturer and consultant. Treggiden writes for the Guardian Magazine, the Telegraph Magazine, Elle Decoration and Icon, among others. She is the author of The Makers of East London and of The Residents: Inside the Iconic Barbican Estate.