Live Form, Women, Ceramics, and Community

Jenni Sorkin’s extensively researched book Live Form is focused broadly around the lives, work, and writing of three women potters: Margeurite Wildenhain (1896–1985), Mary Caroline (M.C.) Richards (1916–1999), and Susan Peterson (1925–2009). The wider context of the discussion creates a bold and compelling argument linking their activities to the performative and participatory practices of the avant-garde: not a place where studio pottery often sits. Admittedly, two of the women had connections with that quintessential institution of the avant-garde in the United States, Black Mountain College in North Carolina, but the approaches of all three were arrived at autonomously and move on in different directions. These women, it is argued, can be seen as proto-feminists. None are strongly identified with the feminist polemics of the third quarter of the twentieth century; rather, they are independent thinkers and doers, ploughing their own furrow. All three were practicing potters making functional vessels, but their pottery features only modestly in the canon of ceramic art. Their significance, Sorkin proposes, lies in a commitment to clay work as a holistic life experience, which they fostered through teaching, writing, and lifestyle choices.