Lecture - A Way of Reading: Contemporary Ceramics by Richard Penn

A Way of Reading: Contemporary Ceramics 

Two Public Lectures by Richard Penn at Public Record Saturday 18 July and Saturday 25 July, 10:30am for about one hour lecture + open conversations at the end. 

Contemporary ceramics is one of the most vital and restless fields in art and making right now. It is also one of the most difficult to navigate. The range of work being produced across sculpture, installation, functional ware, conceptual practice, and everything in between, can feel bewildering even to those already familiar with the medium. These two lectures offer a way in.

Rather than tracing movements or assigning works to categories or themes, they propose a method for reading contemporary ceramics, one grounded not in theory but in the conditions of the medium itself.

Lecture 1 — Saturday 18 July: The Method

Ceramics carries an unusually complex inheritance. It sits at the intersection of art and craft, of the functional and the sculptural, of the domestic and the monumental. That position has never been fully resolved, and contemporary practice doesn't resolve it either. It works within it.

And then there is clay itself. Clay is not a neutral material. It moves, shrinks, and cracks. It records the decisions made during making. And once fired, it cannot be returned to its previous state. There is a point of no return. That irreversibility is not just a technical fact, it is structural. It shapes how risk, process, and transformation operate as sources of meaning in the work.

It is from these conditions, the medium's relationship with craft and function, and the particular behaviour of clay as a material, that this lecture develops its method. A way of locating what a work is doing, where its pressure lies, and what it is refusing.

The lecture also addresses a question that often goes unasked: what do we actually mean by contemporary? Not all ceramics made today is contemporary ceramics in any meaningful sense, and understanding that distinction turns out to be one of the most useful tools we have for navigating the field.

Lecture 2 — Saturday 25 July: The Method in Practice

The second lecture puts that framework to work. Moving through nine works and practices in sequence, it tests what the method can and cannot do, showing how the same fundamental pressures can produce completely different results in completely different practices.

The works and practices covered range across installation, vessel, surface, and process from Simone Leigh's engagement with the logic of architecture and the body, to Ai Weiwei's deployment of one hundred million hand-made objects, to the surfaces of Wi Taepa, the material histories of Theaster Gates, the kiln practice of Andrea du Chatenier, and the self-imposed rules of Toby Twiss.

Booking essential  - (Limited seats available) 

Saturday morning lecture - $10 per person 

Any enquiries - enquiries@publicrecord.shop 

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Brochure design by Richard Penn