“An artist is someone who produces things that people don’t need to have but that he - for some reason - thinks it would be a good idea to give them”. ——Andy Warhol

“Ceramic Transitions” is an ambitious and thematic exhibition with the special advantage that its theme is developed both from the existing or especially developed artworks of artists working in the area of ceramics from China and Bulgaria. Questioning themselves and today’s reality participants of the event try to create their own understanding of the image of art and ceramics present today. The artworks on the show, simply put, had as its basic tenet an understanding that artists work with meaning, not only with materials, shapes, colors and techniques.

Shapes, Colors, Materials as time and space, as an idea, as objects, as forms and these issues pertain to the reception and production of work themselves. The art of ceramics can manifest itself in all of the ways in which human intention can manifest itself. In this exhibition artists are creating new dialogues by incorporating new mediums into their artworks that are now viewed as the fringe elements, such as clay, paint, plastic, paper, ready-mades, textiles and metal.

Towards the end of 19th century William Morris enunciated the doctrine that the most important role of the arts is in the creation of everyday things used by multitudes of people. This association of art and utility, of artist and technician, was not a new idea but the revival of a very old one. Before the Renaissance art and craft, artist and artisan were identical concepts. The word “artist” is distinguished from “artisan” apparently did not come into use until the 16th or 17th century. The expression “fine art” as distinguished from “useful arts”, or as we use to say today – craft, did not come into use until 18th century. Although these distinctions still prevail in our present time, one finds many areas in which art and craft seem to be moving toward each other even with the framework of a specialization imposed by a highly industrialized society.

Nowadays craft and art traces the rise of the “craft-art” phenomenon through the writings of critics and practitioners active in both fields. Art is supposed to be enigmatic. Art must asking questions — questions that might some time is not possible to be answerable. Craft and ceramics must be supplemental, is organized around ‘material’ experience, and presents of ‘skill’ is the most complete embodiment of craft as an active, relational concept rather than a fixed category. And also is ‘structured’ and want to be perfect to show that both ‘the pastoral’ and ‘the amateur’ are conceptual structures in which craft’s marginalization has been consciously put to use.

Clay, perhaps more than any other material, undergoes a fabulous creative transformation – from palpable substance to a stone like, self supporting structure – the self- recorded history of which is burned and frozen into itself by fire.

One of the most successful artists today Robert Arneson working in ceramics today is the opinion, which elevated clay as a medium and changed the definition of craft - art. Arneson was inspired by another one artist Peter Voulkos, and he rejected the idea that ceramic artists can produce only utilitarian or decorative items and in the 1960s, began creating a non-functional clay pieces which contradicting the more formal traditions previously associated with this medium. He said that ‘when artists invade a craft medium, they deliberately make work that is nonfunctional as a way of showing that, though the medium is associated with a craft or design, the work is art’. To create a form, an object, no matter what kind – art or craft, with functionality to a completely with out any functionality, an artwork, we always need our mind and hands. And this exhibition is about creativity – mind and hands, the simplest way to do and create something. What the hand and arm motion can do in relation to flat surfaces is different what hand, arms, and body movement can do in relation to objects in three dimensions.

At the end I want to use the words of Marcel Duchamp, who made it clear in his opinion that “art history is not art”, and also that “I don't believe in art, I believe in the artist.”