It's interesting to think about the different shapes and overall end product an artist might make and how it is just a metaphor. Rawson explains how even though the artist might make and manipulate a piece of clay to make it look like a bamboo figure but nevertheless it will still be a pot. Another example of a metaphor is the porcelain box that has been shaped to look like an apple with the handle being the same shape and size of a caterpillar, it still has the same purpose of a box. Then Rawson goes on and explains how in the mid 18th century in South Germany and France porcelain was a huge hit and that Westerners just took it for granted. Porcelain was everywhere, in decorating interiors to intricately be made for tea-sets. It still lingered even after the austerity of Neo- Classicism had eliminated it.
It never came to mind how pots were perceived. Especially centuries ago how a simple pot depending on its coloration and painting would symbolize worship or as a funerary vessel to contain ashes of the dead. And not only pots but just abstract clay figures and the "potter's space" they contain. And how they are either painted, decorated, or their shape alone. It is interesting to know that pots have two kinds of significance when they are given some kind of symbolic or figurative plastic projection into actual space. One of them being emblematic, how such emblems refer to ideas, but not to concrete facts which can enhance the ideas they symbolize with their own existential density. Then there are the non- emblematic developments of the ceramic container which takes the direction of sculpture.
Over all it is pretty interesting to know about the history of ceramics in a way and everything that has developed since the beginning.
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