As artists, if we made ceramics just to be functional, we wouldn’t be making ceramic art. We’d be making ceramic tupperware. Think about it. Tupperware is very light, cheap, portable, durable, and stackable. You can heat, store, and eat your food out of it. Plastic tupperware is automatically more functional than any dish made out of ceramic due to the properties of the material.

If your statement is to make things functional, then why make things out of clay? Our statement cannot simply be one of function, it is one of design elements that convey additional content.


As clay artists, we especially cannot be caught thinking of a cup as ‘just a cup’. It’s function is to hold and allow us to enjoy liquid, but its function is also and primarily art. It’s function is sculptural as much as utilitarian. Otherwise it wouldn’t be art, it would be a slip-cast mug or a plastic tumbler from a department store.

If we know this, then why is it when I meet another clay artists, one of their first questions is inevitably, “potter or sculptor?”, “pottery or sculpture?”, separate and concise categories without a thought that they may be the same thing.


What do the tile makers say to this? They are often utilitarian clay artists, but when someone says ‘functional ceramics’ they inadvertently are expecting ‘pottery’. Tile is not really considered sculpture either, existing in both the two and three dimensional realms to varying degrees according to the artist. They are forced to answer to this question with, “None of the above.”

How many clay artists make both pottery and sculpture or consider our pottery to be as sculptural as anything labeled sculpture? To say that something is ’sculptural pottery’ is a misnomer, telling people that other utilitarian pottery itself isn’t at all sculptural. To define pottery as utilitarian is to define it as being functional before being, or without being, art. These definitions are inaccurate for the contemporary clay artist.

With the risk of sounding like a post-modernist saying, “Everything is art,” I’m going to have to say:

“All pottery is sculpture.”

Disagree if you want, but you can’t argue with the functionality of tupperware.