The NCECA conference in Detroit last April offered the ceramics world its usual embarrassment of riches: makers, teachers, collectors, and more clay in more iterations than any one person could reasonably absorb. With over 50 exhibitions vying for attention, discernment became its own minor art form. But for anyone interested in the lineage of fine-art ceramics, “Volume Rediscovery” at Paul Kotula Projects stood apart—less as another entry in the event’s visual overload than as an authoritative key to much of what was on view elsewhere.

        Four historically significant figures, joined by four still-active innovators, make “Volume Rediscovery” feel less like a dutiful survey than a brisk lesson in how ceramics became one of the more conceptually fertile precincts of contemporary art. The work of Tony Hepburn (1930–2023), Howard Kottler (1930–1989), Jim Melchert (1930–2023), and Robert Turner (1913–2005) helped to establish terms of discourse that remain evergreen: craft as fine art, the dignity of labor, sharp social commentary and spiritual inquiry. If those issues now feel familiar, it is partly because the artists gathered here did so much to define them. Their influence extends well beyond the objects themselves, carried forward through teaching, writing, and the slow but durable contagion of ideas.

        Tony Hepburn’s long fascination with the metaphysics of ordinary things comes into focus here in Draw Shave, an installation that makes the everyday seem faintly ceremonial. On a wooden shelf, five stoneware facsimiles of industrial vessels stand in formation, flanked by a pair of abstract columns that lend the arrangement the air of a domestic altar. Hepburn was never interested in utility for its own sake; what compelled him was the way common objects accumulate meaning simply by existing in the world. Born in Manchester, England, he spent most of his creative life in the United States, where he found Detroit especially congenial, serving as Visiting Head of Ceramics at the Cranbrook Academy of Art from 1992 to 2008.

        “Volume Rediscovery” continues its turn toward the spiritual with two vessels by Robert Turner, Dome and Jar #1. African culture-derived cones and cylinders, with a deliberately narrow palette of glazes, give these works their particular authority: austere, lucid, and quietly profound. A lifelong member of the Religious Society of Friends and a conscientious objector during the Korean War, Turner brought to clay a seriousness of purpose that shaped his aesthetic language.

         Howard Kottler treated clay less as a noble medium than as a useful accomplice in carrying out his personal program of art-historical parody, sexual innuendo and cultural mischief. The works on display are physical evidence of Kottler’s wit: Toro Toro, with two ovoid forms perched on a pedestal, turns masculinity into an absurdist emblem. Nearby, Face Vase offers an ironic double self-portrait, complete with Fu Manchu mustache, the two profiles framing a “vase” of empty space.

        Last, but definitely not least among these four seminal figures in contemporary ceramics, we find Jim Melchert. His wall-hung artworks, Reno to Vegas, Keyboard Flamenco, and Currents are more pictorial than sculptural and built around the concepts of damage and repair. Broken commercial tiles, selectively glazed and painstakingly reassembled, become compositions in which fracture is not simply endured but formalized, the pathos of damage redeemed by care.

        The four younger artists in the exhibition—John Gill, Jim Shrosbree, Laith Karmo and Jae Won Lee—manage to balance rigorous studio practices with teaching in prestigious academic programs. In that respect, they carry forward one of the exhibition’s persistent throughlines: the transmission of ideas from one generation of makers to the next.

        John Gill’s massive Vase (2011) holds a central position in the gallery, its undeniably authoritative presence leavened by dynamic balance and varied color. Its footed contrapposto suggests either a stomping presence or an animated edifice. In its singularity, it illustrates Gill’s embrace of chance and intuition in constructing variations on the vessel form.

        Jim Shrosbree’s eclectic assemblages are well represented in “Volume Rediscovery,” where they add a welcome note of play without tipping into whimsy. Clay forms only part of these agglomerations; cloth, wood, wire, and graphite are also enlisted, each material contributing to his idiosyncratic visual logic. Seemingly thrown together, the works nonetheless maintain a curious internal balance, at once awkward and graceful, provisional and resolved. Their contradictions are not liabilities but part of their appeal, giving the sculptures a restless coherence that feels entirely their own.

        A large steel table, custom-made and topped in glass, presents a small collection of Laith Karmo’s ceramic works, from the enigmatically titled Rod-P.S. (2024) to the more disarming P.A.S. (2024), a footed dish-and-tray arrangement humbly filled with pistachio shells. A mustard-colored bowl (Yellow Bowl, 2015,) proves especially memorable; its oddly boat shaped presence is just eccentric enough to hold the eye. For Karmo, clay appears to function less as a medium than as a method: a way of ordering experience and comprehending his world.

        Unlike Laith Karmo, Korean American artist Jae Won Lee uses clay not to define belonging but to navigate the more uneasy emotional terrain she occupies as a cultural hybrid. Her painting-adjacent diptych, In Her Shadow: Dear Mother, (2015,) combines ghost-white porcelain with rows of fragile cast twigs. Its surface feels less constructed than remembered, flat, skin-like, faintly unsettled. The result is melancholy without melodrama, as though loss has been given just enough structure to hold together.

        In the end, the eight artists represented in “Volume Rediscovery” show that ceramic art as a medium has long ago outgrown any dismissive categorization as mere craft. What the exhibition offers is not a tidy survey but something better: a nuanced description of how ideas travel through objects, studios, classrooms, and generations. Vessels, sculpture, tile, and photography all find a place here, but the real subject is continuity—of influence, of experiment, and of the medium’s stubborn insistence on its own validity as a means of expression.

Artists: Tony Hepburn, Howard Kottler, Jim Melchert, Robert Turner, John Gill, Laith Karmo, Jae Won Lee, and Jim Shrosbree.

K.A. Letts is the Great Lakes Region editor of the New Art Examiner, and a working artist (kalettsart.com). She has shown her paintings and drawings in galleries and museums in Toledo, Detroit, Chicago, and New York. She writes frequently about art in the Detroit area.