Degenerate Forms: Women Ceramicists Breaking the Mold of Classical Beauty

The first art museum I ever visited was the Getty Villa in Malibu. I was school-age, and I remember small rooms with slick stone floors, each one filled with stark black- and red-figure ceramic vessels behind glass. In the sixth century BCE, Athenian artisans industrialized the production of these vessels, which were widely exported in the ancient world.¹ Male potters ran workshops staffed by expert workmen and painters, adhering to the aesthetic standards of the day: Plato understood perfect physical beauty as an unattainable goal we must nonetheless keep striving for, and Aristotle said beauty was defined by order, symmetry, and definiteness.² Though their sizes and dimensions vary, most vessels were wheel-thrown, smooth, and thin-walled, each piece bound by expectations of compositional balance and formal symmetry. Their surfaces show scenes mythological and mundane, like Herakles wrestling the Nemean Lion, wedding processions, or women working at home. The most elaborate of the vases were features of symposiums, all-male drinking parties where elite culture was cultivated and corroborated. The painted vessels passed between men reflected their shared stories and values, and reinforced their vision of themselves as the actors and chroniclers of history—and women as the equivalent of household objects to be collected and controlled.

After centuries of enshrinement and exposure, Classical forms engender a certain authority. We’ve been conditioned to trust their quality, to interpret the harmony of structure and surface, form and function as quintessentially beautiful—and thus good and important. In architecture, columns and domes symbolize stability and control; marble busts of leaders add gravitas to government buildings and museum halls; and collections of decorative pottery and sculptures are testaments to individual affluence and aesthetic superiority. J. Paul Getty spent his lifetime amassing what is now a collection of some forty thousand Greek and Roman antiquities at the Villa, emblematic of his own search for “true and lasting beauty.”³

Many of the vessels in the Villa are slender, long-necked amphorae or big-bellied krater—the language for them is so blatantly anatomical—but they’re also symmetrical, balanced, and contained—all things a real human body is not. Yet, aesthetic judgments rooted in ancient standards are often baked into the health and wellness rhetoric aimed at women in the US. When I was 10, I was diagnosed with scoliosis, a fairly common orthopedic condition in young girls that causes the spine to curve with growth. Initially, the doctor told me I was crooked, and throughout years of treatment, my illness was always articulated in such aesthetic terms. Crooked, humped, uneven—these attributes signified my defect. I had little pain and few functional problems, but my body was visibly unruly, with flared ribs and skewed hips. It was difficult, then, to resist the promise of cures: a back brace, physical therapy, strength training, weight loss. Growing up in the 2000s, it was impossible to ignore the tempting links between being small and feeling safely contained. Social media has since exacerbated this yearning for the security found in a perfect body and face: take TikTok’s inverted filter⁴—which, much to users’ dismay, reveals your “real” (and usually more asymmetrical) face—or the growing obsession with Pilates for sculpting and shaping the body. Like Plato and Aristotle, we seem to believe our value is rooted in beauty, and beauty depends on having the right kind of body (read: male and white) in the right kind of order (conventional and non-disabled).

If recreating and aggrandizing these highly regulated objects has been a means of social control and assertion of power across time and culture, then deconstructing them can help us articulate new terms of beauty and belonging. Clay, with its inherent hybridity—it is both soft and hard, expressive and utilitarian—is especially useful in the hands of women ceramicists interrogating categorical distinctions. As ceramicist Alison Britton wrote in the early 1990s, the “varied traditional range of ceramics,” from urinals to teacups, creates a “feeling of openness, of ambiguity…of intriguingly blurred categories.”⁵ By invoking familiar forms and their histories while experimenting with scale, symbol, and structure, women ceramicists can use the vessel to introduce change, excess, and unruliness, remixing classical definitions of a valuable object—and, by extension, a valuable person.

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While Cammie Staros’s vessels resemble those of the Greeks in shape, color, and decorative style, none of them look quite “right” according to typical standards. All hand-built, they wobble and swell, with lumpy bellies and lopsided handles cocked like errant elbows. Some look like they’re melting, as if blasted by the tectonic forces of the earth; others are inverted, well-formed, but simply turned upside down on their mouths. “I came to ceramics because I was obsessed with Greek figure vases,” Staros explains. “I was thinking about language, objects, and bodies, and the various relationships between them.” To interrogate the Greek vessel was to investigate the origin story, as she’s called it, of Western art history.⁶

To call renewed attention to these vessels, to their historic meanings and implications, Staros disrupts them. Reclining Nude (2015)—a reference to the many nudes of the Western canon—literally lounges, propped on its side and supported by one of its spindly handles, on a white wooden pedestal that mimics an ancient column. There’s the gesture of a smile spreading across its body; on its stem, one eye stares at us, unblinking. It’s a cheeky, cycloptic subversion of our expectations, failing to meet the rules governing good pottery (the vase has fallen) and good figuration (the figure implied is asymmetrical and fantastical).

“Display strategies have always been an interest of mine,” Staros continues. “And sculpture has the ability, a lot more than wall pieces do, to redefine the exhibition as a spatial experience.” Walking among Staros’s work, there’s a triangulation between viewer, object, and the shared space. Moving among her tilting and tenuous sculptures brings you back to your body. You wonder how something like The Weight of Recognition (2021)—a nearly ten-foot-tall tower of amphorae stacked and joined with small steel balls—stays upright. Their physical vulnerability makes the works more relatable—rather than recursive images of perfection, the works are uncanny portraits. In the tower of amphorae, stacked like vertebrae and secured with metal, I see my own spine. In the glitches and distortions of Looking as One Shouldn’t (2024), I see my body, forever changing, as terrifying as that is.

This kind of physical confrontation and material negotiation is also central to Jasmine Little’s sculptural work, which uses surprising scale while scrambling cultural references. The first time I saw one of her giant stoneware sculptures, I almost ran into it. There was a trio of columnar vessels, each nearly my height, tucked into the foliage around Nina Johnson’s outdoor cabana at this year’s Felix Art Fair. There is a humility and humanity to Little’s vessels—and despite their impressive sculptural scale, calling them vessels does feel apt. “There are high and low associations with their forms,” Little told me when I visited her studio. “It looks like a Greek vessel, but it’s similar to a sewer pipe or a trash can,” she said, referring to their cylindrical shapes. All her vessels are slab-built, and though they’re similar, there are subtle variations in their proportions. Little allows each piece to assume its own physique as she builds, responding to the form as it emerges rather than imposing a system of measurements on each vessel. I think of the back brace that molded me as I grew and wonder what shape I would have taken without medical intervention.

The imagery on Little’s vessels follows the narrative tradition of the Greeks, but they are more reflexive than didactic or aspirational. They’re composite vignettes of classical and contemporary subjects, juxtaposing old and new images of women in fragmented narratives. On one side of Le Malicieux (2025), there’s a scene spliced into four vertical panels: A female figure towers, but she has no head and no arms. Smaller, winged characters encircle the sculpture, carving and chiseling at the large figure’s shoulders, her cracked thighs. At first, I wasn’t sure if I was looking at an act of destruction or restoration, but the work’s title, which translates to “the mischievous,” nods to the grinning, impish figures messing with the sculpture. Little told me the woman on Le Malicieux was inspired by a Vanessa Beecroft sculpture on display in the Manhattan SKIMS store, and I recast the imps as agitators, chipping away at hegemonic beauty ideals. If Kim Kardashian and her brand represent the pressure to reshape the body to meet current cultural standards, then Le Malicieux stands in defiance.

Through her dynamic investigations of the vessel form, L.A.-born Jenny Hata Blumenfield addresses these questions of complicity and composition, creating distinctly feminine forms that refuse containment. Blumenfield, who is half-American, has explained how people in Japan, trying to make sense of her identity, have simply asked: What are you? Her response: I am half.⁷ Rather than try to reconcile such dualities within herself or her work, Blumenfield splits her vessels—abstract takes on female figures—in two. Her 2022 vessel Nude Figure Vase has an obviously undulating shape, its femininity reinforced by the implications of its title—like Staros’s Reclining Nude, it hearkens back to centuries of women depicted by men, sumptuous and passive. There’s an illusion of wholeness, depending on which angle you view the piece from, but it’s composed of two dissected halves, with a negative space in the middle, the sides adjoined by a central flattened piece. Its red-orange center evokes Greek terracotta, or a body cut open on the operating table. But there will be no closure here: Blue glaze on the sides of the vessel adds an ethereal, unbounded quality to the work. There’s an expansiveness to this form—the divide is generative, not debilitating.

In stoneware pieces from the past few years, like Feminine Body of Unknown Origin (2023), Blumenfield also uses subtle kintsugi techniques to fuse two vessel halves and emphasize what she refers to as “moments of separation,” which she sees as metaphors for personal histories. A Japanese art form and philosophy celebrating imperfection, kintsugi is about rejoining: Artisans would traditionally fuse broken pottery or tableware with golden resin, accentuating their cracks to highlight their imperfections. By using kintsugi to bridge the halves of Feminine Body, Blumenfield honors the act of assembly. In her work, disintegration isn’t a problem, but a material reality.

I’ve been slow to embrace this worldview, to accept inevitable interruptions and breakdowns. Scoliosis is idiopathic, meaning there’s no known cause for it—the term comes from the Greek, too, translating to something like “personal suffering,” or a pain of one’s own. The implication was always that the scoliosis was somehow my fault, my responsibility to resolve. Before my spine was fused, I was desperate for a solution, eager to be straightened out and sewed up better than before. But scoliosis is chronic—even a fusion doesn’t completely fix it. There’s still a visible curve in my lower back; nerve pain persists between my shoulders. It’s taken me all of 15 years since my surgery to understand embodiment is always ongoing work. Fusions do secure the spine, but their success depends on the body’s plasticity, its ability to integrate new bone, blood, and metal. There’s a scar from my neck to my mid-back, a long pink line that grows a little darker every year. I find that despite myself, I don’t try to cover it up anymore.

By destabilizing traditional vessels, Staros, Little, and Blumenfield challenge our culture’s longstanding fixations on symmetry and containment, and the limited modes of embodiment and expression these rules allow. I’ve only ever grasped at feeling beautiful by the usual definitions, starving, aching, and straining toward a deeply ingrained and misogynistic fantasy of perfection. But with their swelling, slumped, and split forms, these artists create a conception of beauty very different from Getty’s. They introduce mutablity and idiosyncracy—in their hands, the body is metamorphic and unrestrained. These vessels are not shrines to old ideals—they are impartial mirrors, reflecting feminine forms without demanding their obedience. They visualize a world where women’s bodies are not sites of subjugation, but sovereignty.