Ceramics and Sculpture: Different Disciplines and Shared Concerns
A One-Day Conference to be held in Cardiff at Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales, 5 July 2012

Relationships between ceramics and sculpture are a focus for research at Cardiff School of Art and Design. This research has demonstrated that the interests of studio ceramicists and sculptors in Britain either overlapped or came into particularly sharp focus at certain periods during the last century or so. The Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, has in the last few years awarded research fellowships to explore such relationships and one outcome was the exhibition A Rough Equivalent, curated by Dr Jeffrey Jones in 2010 http://www.henry-moore.org/hmf/press/press-information/henry-moore-institute1/a-rough-equivalent . Both ceramics and sculpture now have to make a case for their survival as discrete disciplines within higher education and, increasingly within the arts, categories are blurred. Recently an issue of Interpreting Ceramics www.interpretingceramics.com was devoted to interdisciplinary approaches in American ceramics and the 2012 issue of the journal will address relationships between ceramics and sculpture. Against this background the conference seeks to illuminate shared concerns by examining points of formal, conceptual, theoretical and material convergences between the two disciplines, while also addressing key points of difference.

The conference is an initiative of Cardiff School of Art and Design (Cardiff Metropolitan University, UWIC) and Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales. Collaborative partners are Interpreting Ceramics; Welsh Institute for Research in Art and Design (WIRAD); National Centre for Ceramics in Wales.