This Is Not Just a Mug

This Is Not Just a Mug

by Ginly Weydh

There’s a mug on my desk, handmade. It has a thumb-sized dent in its side where the potter clearly meant for your fingers to rest. The glaze didn’t quite settle evenly — it pools dark in one corner and blushes faintly blue near the rim. There’s a tiny bump where the kiln must have spat a bit of grit. I love it. Not because it’s perfect. But because it is not.

And yet, if I were to enter this mug into a gallery show, I’d be politely directed to the “craft” tent. Maybe someone would say “cute.” Or “functional.” Or that backhanded compliment: “Oh, I love handmade things.”

Ceramics lives in a strange limbo. Too humble for the fine art world, too irregular for industrial design. And a mug — of all things — is its most maligned citizen. It’s hard to make something less “serious,” apparently, than a vessel for coffee. Never mind that making a good mug is its own alchemy: balanced weight, a handle that doesn’t bite your fingers, a lip that meets yours like a thought.

But here’s the thing: that mug is a sculpture. It’s just one you’re allowed to touch.

The Politics of the Everyday

The marginalization of ceramics — and particularly of useful ceramics — is not accidental. It echoes the way we’ve historically dismissed anything associated with care, with domesticity, with women's labor. To center a mug is to center the hand that shaped it, the body that pours tea, the morning ritual. That’s not decorative. That’s radical.

This mug on my desk holds more than liquid. It holds time. Someone wedged the clay, pulled it on the wheel or rolled and coiled it. Someone made a thousand micro-decisions that now feel inevitable. The imperfection is not a flaw; it is the signature of a human being who chose presence over perfection. Try finding that in a factory-stamped white cup that cost 59 rupees.

Mugs as Memory

There are mugs we keep not for how they look, but for where they’ve been. The chipped one from your grandmother’s shelf. The one you bought on a rainy vacation. The one made by a friend who no longer makes anything. Mugs are emotional storage devices. We wrap our hands around them not just for warmth but for grounding.

There’s a kind of quiet genius in crafting an object that people reach for every single day. No wall label, no spotlight. Just a small, repeated intimacy.

Refusing the Binary

Why must we choose between function and art? A thing can hold both. So many traditional crafts — weaving, basketry, embroidery, pottery — exist in this grey zone because the art world constructed the binary in the first place. “Art” was what hung on walls, what men made, what could be theorized in journals. “Craft” was what women made at home. Something for the table, not the museum.

But the table is where real life happens.

So yes. This mug is a container. But it also contains an argument. It resists disposability. It refuses mass invisibility. It insists on being held.

And maybe — if you’re paying attention — it even makes you feel held back.