A Brief History of Storytelling in Ceramics

I feel the need to investigate the history of narratives, particularly storytelling, using ceramics, as this could be very informative, nay essential, for my own practice.

Over the last year or so, I have undertaken focused research into narrative ceramics. Visits to the Victoria and Albert Museum (specifically looking for narrative works), alongside County Hall Pottery’s Narratives in Clay exhibition, broadened my understanding of how ceramics can communicate meaning. Many works employed narratives through printed imagery, symbolic motifs, oreven implicated by the title gifted by the artist. However, I cannot say that any of them immediately struck me as depicting a story. Perhaps I am being too literal, but this anomaly has become central to my enquiry.

It is here that I see a distinction emerging.

Narrative ceramics vs storytelling ceramics

Narrative ceramics, for me, can be an atmosphere, a memory, a quote, a suggestion, or a symbol. They imply meaning without requiring resolution. Storytelling ceramics, however, contain sequence. They imply an event. There is a before and an after. Even if only one moment is depicted in the ceramic piece, you sense the rest of the story unfolding just outside the frame.

This became clearer during my Research in Context assignment, where I interviewed several contemporary, notably narrative artists. None of them were depicting a story in a conventional sense. Lucy Baxendale is perhaps the closest of the four, with her work developing into characters through illustration, stories evolving from the lines of what she describes as “3D drawings”. The other artists, David William Sampson, Qiu Fang Colbert, and Jaeeun Kim, have looser interpretations of memories, quotes, and drawings which suggest a narrative, rather than presenting a story.

Fundamentally, I selected these artists because I love their work. Narrative, storytelling or otherwise. But my own practice has a different intention.

My work is based on an invented world of a Victorian freakshow and the characters I have developed within it. Ideally, I want each piece to contain both a character and one of the stories they feature in. Whilst this gives me more to go at in terms of design, it also creates a difficulty: how does a static object contain a continuing plot?

This is precisely why researching storytelling in ceramics feels necessary.

Ceramics: the oldest portable storytelling device

Ceramics span thousands of years and can be functional, decorative, or both. This is true the world over, most notably in East Asia, the Middle East, Mesoamerica, and Europe. China is noted as the birthplace of porcelain, with the United Kingdom famed for developing bone china. Italy’s colourful maiolica rivals the vibrant Spanish majolica. Over the centuries, practices were transported across the globe, with clay bodies, glazing, styles, firing, and processes all becoming amalgamated.

Contemporary ceramics now exploit materials and techniques in ways that move the historical functional pots we see in museums into the ceramic art we are privy to today. But long before galleries existed, the humble ceramic vessel was already unwittingly doing something quietly extraordinary: carrying meaning across time.

Ceramics are one of the few art forms that survive in large quantities. Textiles rot, wood burns, paper disintegrates. Clay, once fired, becomes a time capsule. It makes sense that humans would use pottery not just to contain food and drink, but to preserve their stories.

Ancient storytelling in clay: not just decoration

Narratives in ceramics are as old as pottery itself.

The Mesopotamians depicted scenes of warfare and cultural life, embedding social hierarchies and myth into relief and surface pattern. The Ancient Greeks focussed on mythology, painting gods and heroes across amphorae and kylixes. The Mayans created vessels whose surface designs depicted ritual, royal lineage, and cosmic narratives.

Strikingly, these aren’t just illustrations. Rather, they are visual records of belief systems. They tell you who mattered, what was feared, what was worshipped, and what was celebrated.

Greek pots in particular feel almost movie-like. A moment is frozen, but the viewer is expected to know what comes next. That expectation is storytelling in itself.

In Mesoamerica, Maya ceramic vessels frequently combine imagery with glyphs that identify rulers, events, and cosmology, operating as both object and record.

Medieval and early modern storytelling: the domestic stage

Between ancient and modern times, narrative ceramics did not disappear. They simply evolved.

In the Islamic world, lustreware and painted wares often included courtly scenes, musicians, riders, and poetic inscriptions, turning bowls into shimmering storytelling surfaces. In Europe, tin-glazed traditions such as maiolica and later Delftware depicted biblical scenes and moral tales. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Staffordshire transferware brought narrative imagery into mass domestic circulation, often depicting political events, royal figures, pastoral fantasies, and industrial pride.

In short, ceramics became a kind of household theatre with stories moving on to depict important opinions of the era.

The vessel as a page: poetry and ceramics

One of the most beautiful intersections of storytelling and ceramics is the moment when the pot literally becomes a page. A striking example is the Tang dynasty tradition of inscribed ceramics. I came across the poem line:

“君生我未生，我生君已老” (You were born when I was not yet born; I was born when you had already grown old.)

It depicts a couple’s regret that they were not born at the same time, missing the chance to be together in their prime. The poem was found on a ceramic vessel from the Tongguan kiln in Changsha, Hunan province.

This, for me, is storytelling distilled. A whole story in one ceramic vessel. A tragedy compacted into glaze and clay. It has an almost profound beauty.

Summary: applying to my own practice

So what does this mean for my freakshow world?

If I want to embed storytelling into my ceramic characters, I need to consider what ceramics does best.

Ceramics struggles with linear narrative in a way that books and film can achieve, but it excels at:

• single moments that imply an entire plot

• symbols that act as shorthand

• repetition of characters across objects

• text fragments (titles, captions, quotes, poems)

• sequential sets (multiple pieces that form chapters)

Perhaps the real issue is not that ceramics cannot tell whole stories, but that it rarely tells them in one neat package.

My freakshow world might actually be perfect for clay, because it is episodic by nature. It lends itself to the characters, props, artefacts, souvenirs, and relics. Things you might find in a cabinet, with labels, and with rumours or history attached.

These insights are useful to devise strategies for my own practice.  If I’m going to build a world in clay, I don’t just want my audience to see it, I want them to feel like they’ve stumbled into it.  I want them to hear the music, smell the circus, and look behind the scenes.

References:

County Hall Pottery (2025) Narratives in Clay (exhibition), County Hall Pottery, London, 19 February 2025

Dinsmoor, W.B. (1975) The Architecture of Ancient Greece. New York: Norton

Victoria and Albert Museum Ceramics collections. V&A Museum, London, 19 February 2025

British Museum (n.d.) Achilles slaying Penthesilea, Attic black-figure amphora signed by Exekias, c. 530–525 BCE. British Museum, London. Available at: https://www.britannica.com/art/amphora-pottery (Accessed: 9 February 2026)

Transferware Collectors Club (n.d.) Pattern of the Month, Transferware Collectors Club. Available at: https://www.transferwarecollectorsclub.org/news-information/pattern-of-the-month?page=6 (Accessed: 9 February 2026)

Greek amphora depicting Achilles slaying Penthesilea

Tang dynasty ceramic vessel with inscribed poetry

Staffordshire transferware plate depicting a historical scene