Ceramics = Art + Design

Strongly committed to contemporary concerns and 21-century technologies, the Ceramics program has continued to embrace current social practices across the cultural landscape of art and design. The program seeks to mine the wealth of new possibilities offered by the merging of traditional ceramics techniques with digital technologies, while maintaining its cultivation of sensitivity to the rich history of the medium and the continuing cultural resonance of that legacy. Often cross-listed with courses in other areas, ceramics offerings at Emily Carr foster collaboration of both ideas and methods. Our classes bring visual artists into dialogue with industrial designers, creating a vibrant and expansive context for the development of work that spans both fields and often defies categorization.

By nature ceramics is a multidisciplinary practice that incorporates various artistic processes, conceptual skills and industrial knowledge, from sculpture’s concerns with site-specific spatial contexts to a designer’s engagement of ergonomics and societal needs, and from painterly approaches toward decoration to other surface applications that correlate to print-making processes. Investigations into the production of objects in clay can be boldly expressive or highly scientific, and this diversity is what lends the ceramics field its richness. Ceramic materials remain the thread of continuity in a practice that ranges immeasurably in context, formal vocabulary, and meaning.