Alison Britton

This is the first comprehensive book to be published in over forty years on the life and career of British ceramicist, writer and curator Alison Britton (b.1948), widely celebrated for her innovative approach to contemporary making. Britton is one of a generation of gifted women (including Elizabeth Fritsch, Carol McNicoll and Jacqui Poncelet) who emerged from the ceramics department of the Royal College of Art in the early 1970s. By 1982 Britton became the voice of her cohort, writing of 'two-faced objects' that gave 'more than was demanded of them'. Moving from anthropomorphic jugs figuratively inscribed to complex forms carrying abstract marks, Britton never lost sight of the immemorial history of ceramics, and indeed of functional objects of all kinds. Her pots can be seen as mediations on the world of goods from which she has evolved a poetic language that draws on architecture, the classical world, industrial production, the painterly avant-garde, the human body, and chance encounters with everyday vernaculars. Running in tandem with making has been Britton's admired career as a writer on ceramics and as a curator calmly engaging with those who sought to impose hierarchies within the worlds of craft, art and design. Her first curatorial outing was as part of the team behind the Craft Council's seminal exhibition The Maker's Eye (1982). It is this important moment that Tanya Harrod takes as her starting point for the book, recognising it as pivotal in Britton's story - a point at which she introduced '...a new dimension to the idea of craft...'. Authoritative and compelling, Harrod's account analyses Britton's original approach, allowing us to see and appreciate her significance both within the history of British Studio Pottery and the wider world of 20th- and 21st-century fine art.