Chapter 2 "THE 20TH-CENTURY AVANT-GARDE" and the new creator of sculpture in ceramic

CHAPTER 2, from pottery to science-based ceramic.

Before continuing with the great advance in the development of ceramic art, I would like to take a trip back in time until the first creators of ceramic objects in clay. Please, close your eyes down, take a deep breath and let me drive your mind to a fictional place, long time ago. There, a group of primitive potters are looking for clay to create their ceramic objects. This ancient vision of a potter collecting clay, maybe from the bank of a river, is as old as the first vessels made for the human being. In those early days, the limited scientific process for creating ceramic material was based on a try-and-error approach. The knowledge achieved from this experimental process was transmitted from generation to generation, through recipes for the creation of ceramic material. However, to push the development of ceramic creation, those potters needed for a new work procedure that was based on both experimentation and scientific theory.

Thank you so much for your collaboration! Now is time for returning to Europe and the porcelain development. Henceforward, porcelain market expanded over all of Europe. New ceramic developments were achieved in Europe. Please, let me introduce one of most important character of scientific advance in the creation of ceramic material. The great chemist Hermann August Seger, born in 1839 in Posen, a Poland-based region. In his first publication, Hermann Seger emphasized the necessity of studying the physical properties of clay body. Focus on its structure, plasticity, water absorption, drying, burning, and shrinkage. In order to systematized the new procedure Hermann Seger created his famous “Seger formula” also known as “Unity formula”. This formula lies in a method of rational analyst in which clay is looked upon as a mixture of chemical compounds. His introduced the idea of formulae for glazes and clay bodies. This idea was transformed in a new very useful nomenclature. The Seger principles for this nomenclature are based upon three kinds of chemical compounds: Fluxes, intermediates and glass formers. The first one, correspond to the alkali and alkaline earth content. The second one is those of the intermediate neutral content. The third one is the siliceous content. This rearrangement of the raw analysis into functional equivalents, provided a means of comparing compositions of immediate use to ceramicist. The mindset of transforming chemical analyses into rational mineralogical compositions is still employed by ceramicist all around the world.

From then on, ceramic creators had a very important science-based tool to design chemical compounds for their own glazes and clays bodies. Earlier potters used to work just with experimental methods to create new glaze and clay bodies, but with “Seger Formula” ceramicist were able to combine theoretical and experimental practice. This is a new science-based ceramic. Nevertheless, as a ceramicist artist I find the term “science” so hard to understand, maybe like some of you think about it. Because of that, let me talk about science briefly. As a general principle, science has three different faces: science is discovery and description; science is explanation; and science is a way of thinking. Mainly, science is a search for structure, for discovery and description of ways of finding or organizing a rational arrangement of individual components of knowledge, a structure of things and groups of things; structure of processes and groups of processes. Science is also a search for operational principles explaining how things and processes work. An operational principle explains how the parts of a device or structure or process fit together and work together to achieve a given result. Finally, science is an organized way of thinking that requires defining questions about things and processes and operational principles in such a way that one can formulate conjectures or hypotheses that are subject to testing by experiment or experience. Having that said, we are able to speak about the new ceramic creator not just as a craftsman but also as a scientific. That very important innovating working process became potters into ceramicist! Along 19th and 20th century, the new ceramicist carried out great developments into glazes and clay bodies. As a result, new astonishing ceramic creations were achieved, and for later 19th century a new ceramic rebirth spread across Europe, so call the “Ceramic Renaissance”. Although this movement reached a great importance in Europe, there was a country where the new ceramic practice achieved a very high level of development. That country was France.

TO BE CONTINUED...

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