Radical Ceramics and Alternative Communities

This Research & Knowledge Exchange Doctoral Project brief summarises our priority areas of research interest under the heading of: Radical Ceramics and Alternative Communities - The Leach Pottery Legacy

We welcome all research degree applications aligned with and in response to this brief.

This collaborative project proposes developing a research project looking at new and diverse narratives of the Leach Pottery and its community. Students and potters came from all over the world to the pottery in St Ives, and this international exchange created a vibrant ceramics community. In what way did the Leach Pottery, and the wider creative community in St Ives, become a diverse and international centre for ceramics in the 1960s? 

As Jenni Sorkin argues in Live Form: Women, Ceramics and Community (2016) pottery is a way of participating and engaging with community through practice, and was particularly important for women and queer people in developing alternative communities that enabled potters to develop self-sufficient creative careers. 

This proposed PhD project will look at newly acquired and unresearched archives at the Leach Pottery to uncover new and diverse narratives about the history and heritage of the Pottery’s community in 1960s and 1970s. Building on recent research on the Leach Pottery that looks at its legacy in local, national and international contexts, it will take a queer and postcolonial approach to archive research, and will look at the how the intersections of class, gender, race and sexuality created communities of making and social practice. 

Projects deriving from this brief are expected to sit within the Research & Knowledge Exchange strategy and the following Department.

All successful research degree project proposals must emphasise a clear alignment between the project idea and our Research & Knowledge Exchange strategy.