What is ceramics? The complete guide for 2027

A mug, a roof tile, a bathroom wall tile, a washbasin: all of them are examples of ceramics. What they share is not a shape or a use but a transformation. A soft material is formed, dried, then heated until it becomes a different one.

What is ceramics?

A ceramic is an object made of clay, shaped and then fired. The word comes from the Greek keramos, potter’s clay, and entered English in its modern meaning around 1850. It covers two worlds: the potter’s studio, part craft and part art, and the advanced, or technical, ceramics developed in the 20th century for properties that ordinary pottery cannot match, such as extreme hardness and resistance to heat and wear. These are made from fine powders of inorganic compounds such as alumina, zirconia and silicon carbide, heated until the grains fuse: the process is called sintering. Their applications include hip and knee replacements, dental implants, cutting tools, electronic components and the heat-shield tiles of the Space Shuttle.

In this V&A film, the ceramicists Kate Malone, a former judge on The Great Pottery Throw Down, and Neil Brownsword tour the museum’s ceramics collection, which runs from Chinese porcelain to contemporary studio work: a fair measure of how much the word covers.

Length 10:54

Pottery is only one part of it: the part that makes vessels.

Earth and fire: why heat changes the material

Wet clay holds whatever shape you give it. Dried, it hardens, but a dry pot dropped into a bucket of water slumps back into mud. Heat drives off the water chemically bound in its crystals, and that chemical change cannot be undone: the pot has become a kind of artificial stone. At higher temperatures, some components of the body, silica and fluxes, melt and fill the pores. This is vitrification.

The properties of ceramics come from this process: they are hard, strong under compression and resistant to heat, wear and corrosion, with low electrical and thermal conductivity. The downside is familiar to anyone who has dropped a bowl: a ceramic does not bend, it breaks. It is brittle, and thermal shock, a sudden change of temperature, can crack it. The raw materials are common elements of the earth’s crust: clay minerals, quartz and feldspar.

Three clays, three temperatures

Traditional ceramics all start from clay, but not the same one. Terracotta, used for roof tiles, bricks and flowerpots, is the oldest and the most basic: rough, unglazed and absorbent. In the studio, three families do almost everything, and the temperature at which each one matures sets them apart.

• Earthenware fires between 980 and 1050 °C and stays porous: unglazed or chipped, it soaks up liquids. In return, it takes bright decorative colours that higher temperatures would burn out.
• Stoneware typically fires between 1240 and 1280 °C and vitrifies: the pot comes out strong and watertight, even unglazed. Much everyday tableware is made of it, and so is most studio work.
• Porcelain fires between 1200 and 1400 °C depending on the recipe. Made mostly of kaolin, it turns translucent when thin, but it shrinks by 12 to 15 % and warps at the slightest error, which makes it the least forgiving material to work with.

The dividing line matters more than the figures: porous bodies on one side, vitrified bodies on the other. It decides what a pot can be used for, which kiln you need and which bag to buy first.

Shaping techniques

Four techniques cover almost everything. Pinching hollows out a ball between thumb and fingers. Coiling builds a wall from rolls stacked and smoothed together. Slab building rolls out a flat sheet, then cuts and joins it like a paper pattern. Throwing forms the pot on a spinning wheel head once you have learnt to centre the clay, which takes several sessions.

The first three are hand-building techniques and give results from the very first class. Industry and many studios also cast slip, a liquid clay, in plaster moulds to make identical items. Learn on a wheel before you buy one; when the day comes, choosing your first pottery wheel explains what matters.

Drying and the two firings

A freshly made pot has to dry slowly and evenly. If the rim dries faster than the base, the difference in shrinkage cracks the piece. It must also be dry right through, or the steam will blow it apart as it fires.

The first firing, the biscuit (or bisque), takes stoneware and porcelain to 900–1000 °C. Earthenware is often biscuited higher, around 1000 to 1050 °C, because many potters mature the body in that first firing and fire it lower the second time. The pot comes out solid but still absorbent, ready to be glazed. The second and final firing follows, at the temperature the glaze and the clay require; this is where stoneware and porcelain vitrify.

A kiln that reaches 1280 °C costs several thousand pounds. In the UK, many home models up to about 60 litres draw 13 amps or less and come with an ordinary plug, but the socket must be on a circuit that can carry that load for a whole firing; anything above 3 kW needs a dedicated circuit fitted by an electrician. Either way it needs a ventilated room that nobody lives in, because glazes give off fumes as they mature. Buying one is covered in choosing a home model; until then, fire your pieces in a studio kiln open to hobby potters.

Glaze and decoration

A glaze is a thin layer of glass melted onto the surface. Ground minerals form its base and metal oxides give the colour: cobalt gives blue, copper green or red, and iron gives amber, browns and blacks or, in a reduction firing, the pale green of celadons. Applied to the biscuit by dipping or brushing, it looks dull and chalky until it melts.

Pots are also decorated with coloured slip, brushed onto the unfired piece, or by carving into the surface. One rule never changes: only a suitable ceramic glaze, fired to its correct temperature, makes a pot safe for food and drink, because some glazes contain lead, barium or cobalt. The “ceramic paints” sold in craft shops are not glazes; their limits are explained in painting on ceramics.

A short history

Ceramics is the oldest of the fire arts: human beings fired clay long before they melted glass or metal. Among the oldest ceramic objects known are figurines, not vessels, such as the Venus of Dolní Věstonice, from what is now the Czech Republic, made in the Gravettian period, around 30,000 years ago.

The oldest known pottery comes from Xianren Cave in China: a study published in Science in 2012 dates it to about 20,000 years ago. In Britain and Ireland, pottery arrived with the first farmers, around 4000 BC. Their plain bowls with a sharp shoulder, the Carinated Bowls, follow a style from northern France; the hunter-gatherers before them had never made pots.

Tin-glazed pottery appeared in what is now Iraq in the 9th century. The French call it faience, after the Italian town of Faenza; in Britain it became delftware, made in London, Bristol and Liverpool. Porcelain is Chinese, but when it was born depends on the definition: the first true porcelain is usually dated to the Eastern Han, and the technique had matured by the Tang dynasty, somewhere between about AD 200 and 800. Europe first imitated it with soft paste, made without kaolin, until Meissen, in Saxony, began making hard paste in 1710. In England, Chelsea and Bow made soft paste from the 1740s, William Cookworthy patented hard paste made with Cornish china clay in 1768, and by 1800 Spode, in Stoke-on-Trent, was selling bone china. Half of its body is calcined bone, traditionally from cattle, and it is prized for its strength and whiteness.

Careers in ceramics

Ceramicist is the word that covers everyone: the studio potter, the porcelain maker, the tile maker, the brickmaker. Factories employ throwers, mould makers and decorators; the advanced ceramics industry employs engineers who develop new ceramic materials and their applications. In the UK, the usual routes in are a college art and design course, a foundation degree or degree in ceramics or 3D design, a Craft Technician apprenticeship, or years as a studio assistant.

Many independent potters combine selling their work, at craft fairs, potters’ markets and galleries, with teaching, which pays more steadily. Selling regularly makes you a trader in HMRC’s eyes: once your sales pass £1,000 in a tax year (6 April to 5 April), you must register as a sole trader for Self Assessment. If you already teach, you can list your studio on Ceramispot.

Where to start

With a session in a studio, before buying anything: trying ceramics for a single session is enough to feel whether you prefer the wheel or hand-building. Make your first pieces in stoneware, which forgives clumsy hands. Choosing a pottery class then helps you decide between a weekly course, a one-day workshop and open studio time.

At home you can shape clay, but what has never been fired is not ceramics. Air-dry clay hardens as it dries and never becomes watertight, so it is never for mugs, plates or bowls you eat or drink from. The fine dust from your work contains crystalline silica, which causes silicosis, a lung disease that cannot be reversed: clean with a wet sponge or a Class M vacuum, never a broom, and wear an FFP3 mask for sanding.