Innovation

In the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, the home of the English pottery industry, early imitations of Chinese porcelain are displayed alongside original works by Josiah Wedgwood, an innovative designer who improved the UK's ceramics industry by incorporating new materials.

Wedgwood's Jasperware, made from white stoneware clay and colored with metal oxides, was decorated experimentally with white relief portraits or scenes from ancient Greek classics.

"In the West, people focus more on innovation than craftsmanship," says Christine Ann, a 70-year-old ceramics artist from Somerset in western England, who believes British potters are innovative and eager to produce original work.

In 1978, Ann was a member of the first group of UK ceramic artists to visit China, and she says the trip had a radical effect on her work.

Ann says some of her monochrome porcelain, such as white plates with spontaneous brush strokes in black, was inspired by Chinese calligraphy, which she has loved since her trip to China. "But I never copy anything. I am very much a maker," she says.

Those sentiments were echoed by Lee, the ceramics artist from High Wycombe: "I don't borrow ideas from Chinese ceramics. The philisophy behind the work is the thing I'm most eager to learn."

pengyining@chinadaily.com.cn