Currently understood as one of the main forms of fire art, ceramics was, however, for a long time understood through a functional perspective, since each and every one of the products made using this technique were made with a specific purpose or utility.
Ceramics is one of the oldest activities of the human being, perhaps the predecessor of many other forms of art. Ceramics in Greek means ‘burnt substance’ or ‘heated substance’, for which reason we could describe this activity as the one that is in charge of cooking certain types of materials with the objective of solidifying them and giving them permanent consistency. The first forms of ceramics have been found in the last period of the Stone Age of Prehistory, a period known as Neolithic in which man had to start building his own storage elements for the agricultural and food products he produced.
Ceramic was, however, from the beginning, a support on which the human being could make different types of inscriptions or designs, in addition to each ceramic element becoming a unique element in itself due to its design, color and style. The oldest ceramic pots and containers already show us colorful designs, shapes and inscriptions made on the material that were probably made to help identify them.
Today, and thousands of years later, ceramics is more than anything an artistic activity that has evolved greatly. In this sense, the human being has been able to develop ceramics with materials other than mud or clay, in addition to inventing innovative and incredible patination, decoration and coloring techniques on top of the material. At the same time, the shapes of the ceramics have varied greatly and while the first ones used to be rough and simple, today you can find wonderful works of art of high refinement and delicacy. Among the different ceramic production techniques we must mention those known as terracotta, porcelain, majolica (typical of the island of Mallorca), earthenware and many others.
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