Cup and blade

Duckworth trained in functional pottery (including the teapot also seen in this gallery), but in the mid-1950s her teachers at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, in London, encouraged her to explore new boundaries for the ceramic medium. Duckworth was drawn to porcelain, which is lightweight, smooth, free of impurities, and intensely white or translucent when fired at high temperatures. It is also notoriously difficult to sculpt, because of its unforgiving nature when manipulated by hand. She characterized it as “a very temperamental material. I’m constantly fighting it…But there's no other material that so effectively communicates both fragility and strength. Duckworth's “cup and blade” series exemplifies these qualities through thinly potted vessels partially bisected with even thinner sheets of rolled porcelain, rendering them functionless.