The Emergence of Modern Ceramics in Nigeria: The Kenneth Murray Decade, 1929–39

Abstract

Relying largely on archival sources, this paper attempts a historical and critical narrative of the pottery experiments and ceramic art pedagogy in colonial Nigeria by the British artist and art teacher, Kenneth Murray, from 1929—when he learned pottery under the influential British studio potter Bernard Leach—until 1939, when he stopped teaching and joined the war effort. The paper proposes that while Murray's experiments using the potter's wheel, glaze, and kiln, were inconclusive, they represented a significant development in ceramics in the 1930s. Yet his introduction of Eurocentric notions of pottery as “handwork” and terracotta sculpture as “art” to his Nigerian pupils in the 1930s framed the direction that modern creative expressions in clay were to take in the country throughout the twentieth century.