This is the second time I've selected this remarkable exhibition. It gets harder, one becomes more doubtful and establishing some kind of coalition with one's fellow judges becomes more difficult. Also a slide is a slide is a slide. But having just looked through the final choice - not sadly the objects themselves but still the wretched slides, handily arranged on a CD Rom - I find myself laughing with pleasure at some of the choices. Yet throughout the judging process the atmosphere was fairly hot-tempered. Pots became people, standing for big issues. Lines of taste were drawn. Mostly I was grateful for Andrew Lord's gentle voice saying - "I'd like to see that slide again". In this kind of situation the generosity of choosing can be eclipsed by the negativity of rejecting. And I think the Exhibition Committee found us to be idiosyncratic judges. So did we measure the health of youthful ceramic practice accurately?

We judged tableware, on the whole, harshly. And sadly, little of the work that was selected looks like potential design for industry. Instead the influence of Walter Keeler and Takeshi Yasuda hover, in particular their tenderness of touch and wayward imaginations. But that is not to say that the ceramics industry should ignore this exhibition. It ought not to be missed because it functions as an array of research and development work - the kind of eye-opener that British ceramics firms desperately need. The industry should take note of the way these young people can make fired clay look like concrete or like frozen floating ribbon, the way they are sensitive to the nostalgic echoes of 1950s and 1960s ceramics and sculpture and that they are ready to work on an installation scale even though commissions for such installations are hard to come by. Tableware fell by the wayside because I think that we tried to choose brave work, sometimes at the expense of fully resolved work.

Figurative pieces do not dominate as they did at the first Ceramic Contemporaries in 1993. Indeed, the difficulty of establishing a workable standard of excellence is underlined by the figurative work. It did not emerge as a coherent genre. Instead we chose pieces that included the wildly expressive, the toy-like, the gruesomely forensic and the powerfully classical. There was very little agreement over this section. It is small but, I think, choice.

The heart of the exhibition turns on the selection of expressive vessel forms. Young ceramicists appear to be looking at post-war Italian ceramics, at the early work of Ruth Duckworth and at the sculptural work of Colin Pearson and Gordon Baldwin. They seem to be wary of current fashions in ceramics. Instead, the Lucio Fontana retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in 2000 surely inspired the material-based adventurousness that characterizes this section.

Choosing turned out to be a surprise and a pleasure. Even the disagreements were fun.