Mingei vs Studio Pottery
民藝 / スタジオ・ポタリー
Mingei comes from Craft Movements and Studio Pottery from Ceramic Styles. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Mingei
Yanagi Sōetsu and his circle found 'the beauty of use' in the everyday wares of unnamed craftsmen. By making anonymity, repetition and utility the measure of healthy form, the movement became the bedrock of Japanese design thought.
Studio Pottery
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Ceramics made by individual artist potters in their own workshops, where one person carries a pot from forming through glazing to firing. It emerged in the early twentieth century as part of a wider revival of crafts and is deliberately non industrial. The Leach Pottery, opened at St Ives in Cornwall in 1920, became its best known centre.
| Mingei | Studio Pottery | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1926– | 1920s– |
| Family | Craft Movements | Ceramic Styles |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | Anonymous craftsmanship / Form following use / The steadiness born of repetition / Local materials and hand habits | Throwing rings, or the seams of coils and slabs, left visible instead of smoothed away / High temperature glazes: ash, celadon and tenmoku, returning again and again to brown black and grey green / Streaked copper red and purple glazes that ran in the kiln and stayed as unplanned marks on the wall / Incised lines inlaid with coloured slip under a white glaze, with a different glaze at rim and foot alone |
| Best used for | Setting the form and the reachable price of everyday wares meant for daily use · Retail and presentation that make the maker and the region the subject | Pulling a product away from factory evenness by keeping the forming marks and the glaze runs in the finish · Selling one off pieces online, where the photography has to show that no two of the same form match |
| Type | Minimal marking, wording that states the use rather than the maker | Keep any lettering small and thin, naming only the piece and the potter, and never decorative. |
| Composition | Favor forms that line up together and avoid one piece standing out | One piece large with space around it. Do not align a row; let heights and tilts stay uneven. |
| Material | Local materials and standing glazes, the same form made many times | High fired stoneware, porcelain and raku. Ash, celadon and tenmoku glazes and running copper reds, laid thick enough to let the coarse body show through. |
| Caution | The moment individual authorship is asserted the premise of anonymity collapses, and what remains is expensive craft merely performing plainness. | Copying only the marks of the hand and adding wobble leaves out the high firing and the behaviour of the glaze, and produces a mass made object that merely looks uneven. |