In 2019, the British ceramist Magdalene Odundo had a retrospective exhibition at the Hepworth Wakefield, called The Journey of Things. On show were 50 of her gloriously elegant, charcoal-burnished pots, made over 40 years, and alongside them 80 objects that have influenced her work during that time. Among these were studio ceramics by Hans Coper, a German who came to England as a refugee in 1939, and others delicately sgrafittoed by Lucie Rie, who fled from pre-war Vienna. There were antique vessels from Egypt and Greece, and ritual objects from many African countries, as well as figurative sculptures by the Frenchman Edgar Degas and allusively representational ones by the Romanian Constantin Brancusi.

This deliberately eclectic display, while certainly telling us a lot about Odundo as an artist, also spoke volumes about the culture of British studio pottery, and how deftly it has absorbed outside influences throughout the 20th century, and continues to do so today. “It made the UK a leader in the studio ceramics field,” says Andrew Bonacina, the chief curator at the Hepworth, who worked with Odundo on the exhibition. “As an art form, British studio ceramics and its practitioners are still completely outward-looking in their nature.”

A porcelain bowl by Dame Lucie Rie (1902-95) was sold by Bonhams for £110,000

Symmetrical Terracotta Piece by Dame Magdalene Odundo was sold by Bonhams for $360,000

Odundo – whose works have been offered in Bonhams Modern Designs sales in New York and London – was born in Kenya, coming to England to study at Cambridge School of Art, then the Royal College of Art in London. When her RCA tutor Eduardo Paolozzi sent her off to the British Museum to broaden her horizons, he assumed she would find enlightenment in the African pots to be found there. But Odundo alighted instead on the work of Christopher Dresser. The Englishman had travelled to Japan at the behest of the British government in the 1870s to bring back new ideas to enrich making traditions in the UK, but his enthusiasms ran far and wide. “She saw a piece derived from a Peruvian stirrup cup,” says Bonacina of one of many designs that Dresser oversaw in his time at the Linthorpe Art Pottery in Middlesbrough, “and realised the importance of the fusion of global styles.”

Indeed, ceramics have been around almost as long as humans, as indispensable artefacts of human existence serving both practical and spiritual purposes, and they offer the perfect syncretic platform – relying not on pastiche but absorption and reconfiguration. And what Dresser made certainly helped to generate the Arts and Crafts Movement, but has also defined the way of British ceramics ever since.

By the late 19th century, William De Morgan, who had his own pottery in London, was experimenting with the motifs found in Iznik ware – fantastical creatures combined with geometric patterns in reds, blues and turquoise greens – and developing ways to recreate the metallic lustreware glaze used in both Hispano-Moreseque artefacts and Italian majolica. By 1910, Bernard Leach had travelled to Japan, where he intended to teach etching in a country still emerging from 250 years of seclusion, but instead became caught up in the practice of Japanese ceramics.

Leach worked alongside the master craftsman Soetsu Yanagi, who had recently brought the concept of ‘the beauty of the everyday’ back from Korea, but also published a book about William Blake in 1914 and demonstrated a deep understanding of Western art. Yanagi owned paintings by Puvis de Chavannes and Gauguin, and mixed European decorative arts with those from old Japan in his home. Perfect storms of cross-pollination, it turns out, were blowing in both directions.

Leach, of course, returned to England, famously setting up a pottery in St Ives with his Japanese counterpart Shoji Hamada. They built an Asian-style stepped stoneware kiln on a former cow pasture – partly choosing this deliberately homespun contraption to allay the fears of locals that they were setting up a factory, rather than an artisanal enterprise. Enlisting the help of a Cornish shovelman George Dunn, even the technology required to make the pots synthesised different cultural traditions.

Morozov found them “amazing”, he told Matisse in his thank-you letter. Ever candid, Serov begged to differ, conceding Matisse had “talent” and “nobility”, but finding “no joy” in his work. “Technically [his] paintings are good, but something is lacking – they are vapid.” He was no more enthusiastic about Manet, and when Morozov was offered The Rue Mosnier with Flags, Serov dismissed it, first by telegram, then in a letter as “uninteresting. All it amounts to is a hastily painted sketch of the Paris streets on some political celebration of the July revolution.” This time Morozov took his advice. (The painting is now in the Getty Museum.) No wonder the critic Abram Efros called Serov “wilful” and his friends nicknamed him “Surov”, from the Russian for harsh, stern or severe.

There Leach set about producing collectable pieces and quantities of affordable tableware that was solid and almost rustic in feel, combining Western forms and oriental glazes in a manner that was almost dogmatically dour at times. When he first encountered the work of the young Lucie Rie, recently arrived from Vienna, he was deeply critical of its urbane sleekness – super-thin in form and thick with glaze. But, as Tanya Harrod, the doyenne of crafts criticism, pointed out on the centenary of the establishment of Leach’s pottery in 2020, Rie routinely outprices Leach at auction these days.

If it sounds like British imperialism is not part of this story, that is of course not the case. Leach had been born in Hong Kong, then under British rule, where his father was a high court justice, and doubtless endowed his Asian birth territory with an almost mystical reverence. Later, his first apprentice Michael Cardew – a highly regarded practitioner and virtuoso of freely decorated slipware – left England for Africa as the studio pottery system faltered during the Second World War. By the 1950s, Cardew had established the Pottery Training Centre in Abuja (the city now called Suleja). Magdalene Odundo had found her way there by 1974 – a Kenyan finally accessing African pottery by way of an Englishman in Nigeria.

Charger with Tree of Life (1925) by Bernard Leach (1887-1979) was sold by Bonhams for £60,000.

Scottish ceramicist Jennifer Lee OBE (b.1956) is known for her distinctive ‘pinch and coil’ methods

While the female potters built pots by hand according to the Gbari tradition, the male potters worked on the wheel. “Under the colonial system, any technology tended to be introduced to men, to make jobs for men,” explains Odundo. It was the Gbari forms that went on to influence her subsequent work back in Britain. “She is very attuned to the symbolism of the vessel and its universality,” says Bonacina. “She sees it as an a object that contains human experience, and a container within which ideas can easily mix.”

But it is equally, perhaps, the non-universal that pervades the British ceramic experience. Akiko Hirai, who came to London from Japan in 2003, works with textures derived from an ancient Japanese technique of ‘folk wood’, carving speedily and rhythmically into the skins of her vessels. “Once I set up my studio,” she said in a recent interview, “I realised there weren’t any universal aesthetics created by culture and education. I started to feel in my consciousness the Japanese aesthetics which hadn’t been noticeable since I’d been living abroad.”

By the same token, Felicity Aylieff, who has travelled to China to take advantage of the local ability to make super-sized pots, says she is liberated by the can-do attitude of the Chinese, but remains attuned to her own Western position. “I’m very wary of being quasi-Chinese.”

In the early 1990s, a young Edmund de Waal travelled to Japan to experience the Mejiro Ceramics Studio first-hand. Back in London in 1993, he started to create a series of pots in classical form, but individualised with pinched sides and inventive textures and tones, and finished in a perfect celadon glaze. Jennifer Lee has also yo-yoed back and forth to the country, inspired largely, she says, “by the level of craftsmanship there, and how they use ceramics daily. Also, it’s disarming to go there. You’re out of your comfort zone and you discover or rediscover new things.” Recently, she started throwing pots while in Japan, after a long time away from the practice, and fired her raw-clay pieces in a wood-burning kiln. So, while British studio ceramics may not have the international dominance they held in the 20th century, with artists such as de Waal, Aylieff, Hirai and Lee working in their studios and passing on their multicultural expertise, they are still in very good hands.

Caroline Roux writes about art and design for the Financial Times.

Asymmetric Amber Lichen Vase (c.1985) by Jennifer Lee was sold by Bonhams for $10,000