Studio Ceramics (Victoria and Albert Museum)

A magnificent catalogue of the V&A's collection of twentieth-century and contemporary British ceramics. Contemporary ceramicists working in Britain, including Rachel Kneebone, Grayson Perry and Edmund de Waal, are part of a broader international group of artists experimenting with clay, considering how it intersects and works in dialogue with other art forms and with culture at large. Recent experimentation with the medium owes much to the rapid evolution of ceramics into an expanded field, and to the work of mid- to late 20th-century potters and their reinvention of ceramics as a radical and contemporary art practice. The pioneering methods and rethinking of form in the work of exponents such as Bernard Leach, Michael Cardew, Lucie Rie, Hans Coper and Alan Caiger-Smith ¿ whose reference points were drawn from East Asia, Africa, the ancient Mediterranean and the Middle East as much as from their own heritage ¿ continue to influence and inspire contemporary makers. In his introductory e