Politics, Crockery and the V&A

The V&A holds one of the most complete collections of ceramics in the world encompassing the full-range of materials and forms. Soviet revolutionary plates, Popish plot tiles, Staffordshire figures of freed slaves represent some of the more directly familiar ‘political’ ceramics that have their proper place in the museum’s encyclopaedic collections. Politics, however, also permeates the activity of collecting itself, most evident in the objects acquired by the Circulation department, where left-wing attitudes predominated. Focusing on examples in the V&A, this paper will explore how competing ideologies have co-habited the ceramic galleries of South Kensington in order to examine the processes of politics as institutional, personal and public.

This symposium explored different approaches to contemporary ceramics practice, to accompany the exhibition 'Confected, Borrowed and Blue…' a touring exhibition of ceramics by Paul Scott at the Holburne (1 November 2014 - 18 January 2015).