Emmanuel Cooper Memorial Lecture 2025 - Julian Stair

Crafts Study Centre

Material, Agency and Embodiment: Pottery in the 21st Century. Ceramic artist Julian Stair will deliver the 2025 Emmanuel Cooper Lecture

Lecture Theatre 1, Royal College of Art (Please enter through Jay Mews entrance)

<p>Julian Stair is one of the UK’s leading ceramic artists, exhibiting internationally since 1982 and with work in over 30 public collections including the V&A, British Museum, American Museum of Art &amp; Design, Mashiko Museum of Ceramic Art, Japan, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Kolumba Museum, Cologne, and the Crafts Study Centre. In the lecture Stair will argue that the multi-modality of ceramics, and pottery in particular, operates as a significant artistic genre within the theoretical framework and praxis of contemporary art. In actively shaping experience through rituals that both embody and conceptualise narratives from the quotidian to the profound, from ‘breaking bread’ to mediating death, Stair situates pottery as providing an opportunity for philosophical re-evaluation of how institutions validate, and markets consume, art. In our increasingly atomised existence (through the advent of the metaverse), the materiality, agency and social locus of pottery remind us what it means to be human.</p>

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