ABSTRACT
'A public monument is, in a manner of speaking, the abridged drama of a great event', said the priest and political leader Henri Jean-Baptiste Gregoire, who was greatly concerned with the destruction of French heritage during the revolution. While the sculpture's hilltop position is deliberately chosen, that does not make it a monument. After all, collieries are common in the area, and the location may have been as much to do with visibility from the roads and train line. Because of the centrality of the monument to sculpture, an association with thousands of years of precedence, it is to be expected that ceramics is at a different stage in its relationship with monumentality. Ceramicists whose work is large in scale are using monumentality as a formal element. These works are modernist or abstracted monuments, depicting only their own autonomy, material or making process.
