Admittedly, I don’t really know anything about ceramics.

(the last 10 or so years of it’s gallery-ubiquity has provided a broad and complex array of objects to forge a rich material and rhetoric playground - the fact that lots of artist-ceramicists all insist on not being very interested in the extraordinary possibilities of ceramics is strange (in my acknowledged ignorance), like a lot of painting, ‘badness’ seems to continue to be a virtue with (quasi) ideological intent).

Anyway…

Here is a lovely object in the current Theaster Gates show at the Whitechapel Gallery

although

the wall labels are horrible saying things like …

the kilns are fired at extreme temperatures causing ‘the materials to melt a fuse together. In some cases, Gates has even incorporated the […] kiln shelves into his sculptural compositions… [They] demonstrate Gates’ interest in the chance and alchemy of transforming materials through heat’

really?? Is that actually what Gates thinks?

an artist whose ‘idea’ is to set the thermostat on the kiln too high and gets excited about their objects getting stuck to the shelf is hardly an alchemist.

I’m sure there’s more going on in these works than that. Just look at it. It’s surface and rough-tooled excavations and dark dense glaze are wonderful to look at, they are brutal and physical and material and seem to both embody and record intense energies.