Now Bake Off is ending, the next hot craze is about to come out of the oven…

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/oct/03/great-british-pottery-throw-down-television

Version 0 of 1.

“It’s messy, it’s hot, it’s pottery.” So runs the trail line for the new BBC2 craft show that hopes to repeat the ratings triumph of The Great British Bake Off. It sounds an unlikely, even absurd, pitch, but not that long ago so would pushing the mass appeal of a programme about making cakes in a tent. And the truth is that this year pottery has become, if not hot, then at least cool.

Unlike the “pottery mania” of the 1970s, when evening classes brimmed with free spirits firing earthenware, the latest ceramics craze extends to the heights of fine art and fashion – it is even featured in the latest edition of American Vogue. Next week an exhibit at the chic Frieze modern art show in London’s Regent’s Park will include a work by Jesse Wine described as “a multi-faceted ceramic presentation”. It is likely to involve pots dotted with holes set in a wide sea of pebbles.

Such avant-garde work, including the wildly differing pottery of stars such as Ai Wei Wei, Edmund de Waal and Grayson Perry, has enhanced the status of ceramics in Britain. And yet at the other end of this rediscovery of pots and potting is the consumer success of boutique crockery brands such as Emma Bridgewater’s teapots and Sophie Conran’s work with Portmeirion.

Related: Roger Law: spitting and spinning

This growing appreciation is just what the makers of BBC2’s new show, The Great British Pottery Throw Down, to be broadcast later this year, are banking on. A literal spin-off from the success of The Great British Bake Off, it will see a group of 10 amateurs compete at the potter’s wheel and will be hosted by DJ Sara Cox from the traditional home of British ceramics, the restored Middleport Pottery outside Stoke.

“Clay, mess, passionate potters and the team behind Bake Off. What’s not to love?” Cox has said. “There’s something really raw and exciting about grabbing a lump of clay and creating something unique out of it.”

Finished work drawn straight from the kiln will be judged by established potters Keith Brymer-Jones and Kate Malone.

Encapsulating all this interest is the British Ceramics Biennial, running until early November and also held at Stoke-on-Trent around the site of the restored former Spode factory. This year the event comes after the launch of the £34m World of Wedgwood in Barlaston, the opening of York Art Gallery’s new Centre of Ceramic Art, with its focus on British modernism, and the success of Ceramic Art York in September, featuring 50 exhibitors.

“There is a revival of interest and a realisation that so much is going on across the board,” said Barney Hare Duke, the artistic director of the biennial, which features more than 75 international artists and a range of interactive installations. “We had 1,000 people in as soon as we opened up, and some of this interest is attributable to Grayson Perry making it cool again, but it is a reawakening, because pottery has never really gone away. We are all familiar with crockery, and that gives it an accessibility that fine art does not always have. It is also collectable at every level.”

The renewed glamour of pots is reflected in a piece celebrating the work of a band of cutting-edge “ceramists” in American Vogue. Among the featured artists is Brit Romy Northover, a graduate of Goldsmiths in London who has studied Japanese pottery in Manhattan and now works with Calvin Klein.

“It’s an inexhaustible medium,” Northover told the magazine. Actor Lena Dunham, Vogue readers learn, is also a pottery fan, supporting the work of her friend Isabel Halley, who makes expensive plates.

The obsession with porcelain described in The White Road, De Waal’s next book after the bestselling The Hare with the Amber Eyes, and shared with the former Spitting Image puppetmaker and cartoonist Roger Law, has shed light on the material appeal of the art.

But the true crucible of the renewed hope is Stoke, and especially Burslem, the heart of the Potteries, the “Bursley” of Arnold Bennett’s Anna of the Five Towns and the birthplace of Josiah Wedgwood. Here, and in Barlaston, the resurgence of pottery takes an architectural form in the restored buildings that once made the area famous.

In 2009 the Irish-owned Waterford Wedgwood went into administration and the buildings looked destined for the wrecker’s ball. Then an American private equity company, KPS Capital Partners, stepped in and invested in contemporary designs. Waterford Wedgwood Royal Doulton has since been sold again for £280m to Fiskars, a Finnish heritage brand.

Ahead of last month’s York fair, Ruth King, a council member of the Craft Potters Association, said: “Studio ceramics offer the perfect antidote to big business, globalisation and poorly made mass-produced goods transported across the world.

“In other words, impersonal objects with no ‘soul’. Everyone uses pots. Buying handmade ceramics is the most accessible and affordable way for people to welcome something unique into their lives and also support traditional skills and craftspeople.”The skills of the craft have been in danger of dying out, so this new burst of “pottery mania” has come just in time. With luck, the vocabulary of pot making – words such as jigger, blunger and slip – may soon be in common currency again.