What was our role? Was it to be fair to the hundreds who submitted slides-to give a judicious slice of the exhibition cake to different ceramic genres? Twenty percent to installation art, twenty per cent to post Richard Slee interventions into popular culture? Or was it to respond viscerally to what we saw, to shape an exhibition on anticipated pleasure rather than by a dry distribution of genres? The latter choice prevailed, thank goodness.

Given that these exhibitions are for recent graduates, ceramicists, potters, artists, who are on the cusp between college and independence, it is difficult not to go influence- bagging, noticing the preponderance of particular styles. This is what seems to me to be happening. A new, and perhaps surprising, response to wood-firing. And not just the coating of pots in ash. A lot of biomorphism around: is Barbara Hepworth making a come-back? A fair amount of Martinware-that is vessels made as homage to Martin Smith's machined implacable surfaces. And too many lights. But then there are always too many lights.

In terms of what was missing the greatest lack I felt lay in domestic ware. Just as other art form begins to rediscover tactility, it is strange to feel that ceramics departments are still embarrassed to find students who want to make objects for use. And not objects that foreground use, comment on use, are contextualisations or installations around use, but pots that can have some sort of kitchen life. Either those students are out there, but don't feel that is worth applying for exhibitions, or they have disappeared off the map. The oddness of this is that while sculpture departments are humming with the excitement of material culture-how objects work outside rarified art systems- ceramicists are desperately trying to become transcendental sculptors. Or being encouraged by their tutors to.

Skill has always been a point of argument, and always should be. How it is valued or devalued in the creation of a work of art is an indicator of many cultural anxieties. Given that from Gauguin ('Sevres has killed ceramics') to Fontana, some of the most interesting things in clay have been made in opposition to the skill base of the Academy, the theatre of skill is a problem. Unfortunately, the foregrounding of expressiveness, of this reaction to the technics of making when there is nothing interesting to say leaves you with the impression of angry noise. It is as boring to point this out as it will be to read this, but then these objects were boring to look at.

So what impression was left? That it was going to be a good and a provoking exhibition. That there were intriguing things afoot, a refreshing lack of consensus about what was central to the life of this new generation. But that there was a simultaneous anxiety that many of the applicant students didn?t get out enough. A vision of where ceramics belongs alongside its sister arts depends on seeing the historic canon as broader than a positivist Leach-Voulkos-Britton axis of the Ascent of the Ceramicist.That is, it would be good to see more engagement with historic possibilities. I am not arguing for historicist pots, just better informed potters. Enjoy the show.