Women Potters
Price: $39.95
Subtitle: Transforming Traditions
Author: Moira Vincentelli
Subject: Art Studies/Decorative Arts
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-3381-3
Pages: 240 pp. 8.5 x 10.75, 260 color illus.
Description:
It is often claimed that women were the first potters. While this may or may not be the case, the earliest pottery techniques employ methods that are still used today in many parts of the world, largely by women. The author, Moira Vincentelli proposes that a women's tradition in ceramics is one in which pottery making is a gendered activity intimately connected with female identity. The knowledge is passed down from one generation to the next, mother to daughter, auntie to niece. In much of Africa, South East Asia, Oceania, and among the indigenous peoples of the Americas this is still the case, but even in Europe and the Middle East there are villages that preserve such traditions. The work is usually handbuilt and fired in a bonfire or a simple kiln, as women's traditions rarely involve wheel throwing. It is mostly functional pottery for cooking, storage, and water but its everyday purpose belies the deep symbolic meanings that it may also carry-from beer pots for celebrations and ritual drinking to broken pots as symbols of death. There is The book also includes a chapter on figurative ceramics made by women.
The author Vincentelli guides the reader through these traditions continent by continent. Different areas are illustrated with beautiful, detailed maps and fascinating color photographs from around the world. Central to her argument is the proposition that, far from disappearing as is so often claimed, these traditions are adapting and accommodating to new conditions. Often the potters are the bearers of cultural identity in an increasingly globalized world. They respond in creative and dynamic ways to opportunities offered by craft markets, demonstrations, art exhibitions, museum and tourist outlets. This book should appeal not only to those interested in ceramics, but will also be important for to those with an interest in world art outside the western tradition, in women's studies, material culture, archaeology, and social anthropology.
Moira Vincentelli is senior lecturer in art history and curator of ceramics at the University of Wales Aberystwyth. She is the author of the groundbreaking book Gendered Vessels, Women and Ceramics and has published many essays. As a curator she has developed one of the major public collections of studio ceramics in the United Kingdom.
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Price: $39.95
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