The central theme for research in Ceramics and Glass is the exploration of 'Dialogues of Form and Surface'. Research is grounded in the intent to discover and to innovate, digging and generating. This aspiration makes crucial demands leading to experiment with materials and the development of form and process. It drives the need for enquiry through active practice with clay or glass, kilns, furnaces and tools. Ideas are pushed through the constraints and conditions of material and making.

Focal points of research in our disciplines are Materiality, considerations of Form and Surface, the Critical Context, and Histories.

Our aims are to investigate:

• the characteristics of form in ceramics and glass and how these can be understood, interpreted and re-invented
• the many potential relationships between form and surface
• the digital and the handmade: the development of hybrid digital/analogue approaches
• kinds of skill, physical and mental, across the spectrum of art, craft and design
• the intersection of studies in humanities and contemporary applied art practice

• Shaping Colour: Density, light and form in solid glass structure
• The Poetics of Glaze: Ceramic surface and the perception of depth (poetic and psychoanalytic ideas are used to define physical and visual properties of glaze)
• The Hand and the Glove: Actual and virtual explorations of the ceramic container
• The Physicality of Print: New potential for ceramics offered by image-based technologies (innovation in the integration of pattern and form)
• Drawing and Fabrication: An exploration of transitions between two and three dimensions
• The Feasibility of Producing Stable Zinc Silicate Crystalline Glazes at 1200º or Lower
• Writing Making: Translations between body, site and material
• Mechanisms of In-betweenness: Through visual experiences of glass (Glass explored as a transparent medium for metaphor interrogating East/West decorative conventions)
• A Contemporary, Visual Interpretation of Social Issues through Ceramics Practice Informed by Early Nineteenth Century Precedents
• Glass, Pattern and Appropriation: An exploration of decorative idiom
• Glass as a Medium for Making Documentary about the Everyday
• Stalking the Illusion: Image in glass

Felicity Aylieff
Alison Britton
Martin Smith

Maham Anjum, MPhil by Project
Mia Fernandes, MPhil by Project, RCA Bursary (HEFCE)
Charlotte Humphrey, PhD by Project
Shelley James, PhD by Project, AHRC Bursary
Owen Johnson, PhD by Project
SunAe Kim, MPhil by Project
Nicholas Lees, MPhil by Project, RCA Bursary (HEFCE)
Min Jeong Song, PhD by Project
Conor Wilson, PhD by Project, AHRC Bursary