Relational Ontologies: Material Performances and Ceramic Objects in British Art and Performance Practices

Ceramics and performance are not obvious bedfellows. If anything, the contemporary emphasis on relational aesthetics and the display of performance art within theatre studies has left ceramics, as an object-based form, seemingly irrelevant. Yet, more and more contemporary art galleries and public museums in Britain are featuring work in clay. Why? This article seeks to provide a rationale for this contemporary shift. In doing so, it also seeks to show how ceramic art can exist within the limits of relational aesthetics but also transcend them. By challenging the persistence of eighteenth-century divisions between art and craft and proposing a relationally ontological framework of material that challenges and expands the discourse of relational aesthetics, I demonstrate how ceramic materials perform in manifold ways and contexts.