ARTISTS are exhibiting to celebrate five decades of a world-renowned pottery course that shuts this summer after campaigners fought unsuccessfully for a reprieve.
The recruitment of new students on the Harrow-based course was suspended in 2008 ahead of a consultation by the University of Westminster that ended with the education bosses opting to close the BA ceramics course once the current intake of seven finish in June.
Sixty current and former student and staff are going to exhibit samples of their artwork at the CAA (Contemporary Applied Arts) Gallery in Soho until June 9.
Curator Tessa Peters, a lecturer in the school of media, arts and design based in Watford Road, Harrow, said: “Ceramics as a degree has fallen out of fashion and it’s hard to recruit the numbers of students to make the course continue to be viable so the people who decide these economic things felt it had to go.
“The exhibition, we decided, was going to be like a celebration because the course has been so important to many people over the years, knowing what talent had come out of it.”
More than 800 students have graduated since the course was set up 49 years ago and lecturers have included ceramicist-turned-author Professor Edmund de Waal and cross-dressing potter Grayson Perry.
Ms Peters said: “We wanted to find ways of representing all the different kinds of work that are present in ceramics; pottery, installation, sculpture and video.
“So much has come out of the course that we want to focus on that. There are alumni all over the world.”
The course began as the Harrow Studio Pottery Course at Harrow School of Art in Station Road, Harrow, before the institution relocated to the current campus in Watford Road in 1970/71, becoming the Harrow College of Higher Education.
This college merged in 1990 with the Polytechnic of Central London that became the University of Westminster two years later and the course became a Bachelor of Arts degree in ceramics.
