Finally, the fire fuses with it and transforms its essence, this way reaching the end of its journey.
unique pieces. Being almost invisible in the history of arts, the same way that women artists have been.
Many traditions establish the four elements theory, as well as the tale of human origins, where deity models the human being and gives life to it with its deity. The matter transforms and changes its essence. Ceramists do also model and give life to their pieces as mundane deities would do. Ceramics have ties with the worship of maternity and fertility which are archetypically related to women. Mother Earth expresses herself through these women. The transformation process of the matter by way of heat has been related to the mysterious alchemical processes. For centuries, to ensure a good firing it has been appealed to religious or magical rituals in search of the gracefulness of deities. Women have also raised this kind of astonishment due to their being able to give life, the mystery of their body and their sex which was interpreted as the door through which we are coming to life. The patience, the expectation and the surprise of birth have been related to the times of the ceramic process, which cannot be hastened, as well as the last word of the firing process which cannot be totally controlled. The body of a woman has also been compared to the vessel which hosts life in it.
Invisibility is a feature that has accompanied women as creators of art in general and as creators of ceramics in particular. Genealogies are important to recognize ourselves through them, and female ceramicists hardly have them. The most ancient male authors and female authors are not known and as the generically human is defined in terms of the male, invisibility remains. Therefore, the generic framed in the masculine generates a paradox when we use certain constructions. If I want to highlight a female author as one of the best ceramicists, do we mean that she is the best among female ceramicists or among all potters regardless of their gender? However, if we say the same about a male author, that is to say “he is one of the best ceramicists�, there is no misunderstanding. Language is the tool that helps us to know and interpret the world. It builds our thinking and through thinking we create realities. And unconsciously, it affects our knowledge of the world.
Ceramics is a way of expressing human capacities. It has solved daily problems during revolutionary periods like the Neolithic through agriculture, therefore, the human being has chosen it as a way to make reflections about transcendent, magical, religious, social, artistic and aesthetic issues. The way of considering ceramics has been shifting from disdain, due to its ties with the poorest matter and functional objects, to the worship of luxury mainly embodied by porcelain, the first coatings and floors of palaces, or
Traditional historiography attributes the beginnings of ceramics to women, as a result of women being relegated to the domestic environment. Even if it curiously attributes pictorial and sculpture artistic manifestations to men. Nonetheless, the actual theories which include new perspectives about gender, do not share this work division and we discover new findings like, for example, the presence of women in the pictures of prehistorical hands thanks to anthropometrical studies or the theories that interpret the so-called prehistoric Venus like self-portraits which express the perspective of the self-knowledge of the body. The first names of female ceramicists, revived by the feminist investigations that started at the beginning of the ’70, seem to be related to the field of the reform of decorative
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