When Thomas Hobbes wrote of life that it is nasty, brutish, and short he could equally have been describing the selection process of Ceramic Contemporaries 4, as brutish a process for selectors as for applicants. From our brief exposure to applicants' slides it is difficult to justify the letters of rejection that would shortly be dispatched to homes across the United Kingdom. I hope the determination of the rejected will be strengthened by this slight to soar higher than this, and that both included and excluded might see this as but one of many milestones in a lifetime of looking and making.

In this exhibition there is a concentration of material or craft sculpture, a hybrid perhaps of process art and installation art. There are eccentric vessels and objects. There is, however, not nearly enough simple tableware. With the exception of the missing tableware, I believe the ratio of objects chosen reflects the percentage of entries in each category.

The members of NACHE, under their National Chair David Scott and CC4 Exhibition Committee Chair Kyra Cane, undertook an enormous task in preparing this exhibition and I thank them. I am grateful to the 270 applicants who demonstrated that, in their hands, ceramics remains a living art.

I have been asked to choose a favourite work from this exhibition. There is much to wonder at in many of these objects; the piano wires threading through Bernard Smith's portrait, the Johnsian cutlery embedded in Valeria Merlo's figure and Sue Clark's earnest and complex futurist imagery.

It is, however, Keith Harrison's completely serious and just slightly daft proposal for a work, an electric fire, that stops me in my tracks today. At once familiar and outside any thought I have had of ceramic sculpture, it is thrilling and my best of show.