Like many people, when I first got into studio pottery a decade or so ago, I developed the haptic tic of turning plates, pots and bowls over to see the maker’s mark. I could then cross-reference these marks, typically made with an impressed seal or incising initials, via books like Eric Yates-Owen and Robert Fournier’s British Studio Pottery Marks, or, increasingly, online databases like BISPM (British & Irish Studio Pottery Marks). Tracing these marks, and the names that they represented – Bernard Leach, Hans Coper, Lucie Rie, and so on – provided a potted history of the post-war ceramics boom.

 

A similar history of a quite different production boom of the 1990s could perhaps also be told by its makers’ marks. Ecstasy pills emblazoned with Mitsubishi logos or doves achieved legendary status amongst ravers. The tablet that Essex teenager Leah Betts took before slipping into a fatal coma in November 1995 was notoriously branded with an apple. In a decade defined by Naomi Klein’s No Logo in 1999, pill manufacturers appropriated the aggressive brand marketing of multinational corporations. Sometimes this visual mimicry was cynical (Nike swooshes), sometimes utopian (the ubiquitous smiley), sometimes dystopian (the skull logo of Marvel’s The Punisher), and sometimes witty (the luxury car manufacturer, Rolls-Royce, whose mascot is the Spirit of Ecstasy). Meanwhile, today’s consumers of Ecstasy pills can use the online database pillreports.net to read other users’ experiences and check MDMA purity. Harm reduction agencies such as The Loop issue warnings about so-called super-strength pills, typically identifiable by their Trump or Tesla logos.

 

Simon Bayliss’ It’s Just a Feeling brings together these two diverse traditions of mark-making to explore the Ecstasy culture of the 1990s through the methodology of his own irreverent and idiosyncratic relationship to the conventions of British studio pottery. It draws upon the research that I conducted as part of a Wellcome Trust Humanities and Social Sciences Early Career Fellowship for my project ‘The Effects Can Last Forever’: Ecstasy’s Risks and Pleasures in Britain, 1985-2000. I shared my archival ephemera and over thirty oral history interviews with Bayliss, and traces of this research can be found across these ceramic pieces and video work.

 

Dance culture as an inspiration for artists is well-documented (most thoroughly by curator Nav Haq’s 2016 book RAVE), but the role of Ecstasy within this has often been obfuscated or underplayed in work by Jeremy Deller or Mark Leckey. Similarly, much of the influence of rave on contemporary art practice appears to me to be largely figurative or merely representational. Bayliss upends these conventions, carrying through his playful and irreverent previous treatments of art-historical figures such as outsider artist Alfred Wallis and queer potter Michael Cardew, or the intoxication rituals of harvest celebrations. It’s Just a Feeling interrogates both the emotional communities of rave and the material culture of Ecstasy to create a new body of work that casts fresh light on nostalgia, communal joy and growing up in the shadow of the Nineties.

 

In contrast to studio pottery marks, the logos of Ecstasy pills are an integral part of their production, rather than an authorial embellishment. They are an essential element of their appeal too. These logos contribute to a heritage that extends back to the beginning of the modern pharmacy, their pop culture references and appealing logos part of what the historian Erica M. Storm, writing about nineteenth-century patent medicines, describes as the “sensuous consumption” of pills, tablets and other materia medica.     Typically formed using a pill-press, the logo is imprinted on the tablet, a sunk relief the desired design. Bayliss has produced plates that approximate one half of a pill-press, calling to mind the outsized pills of Brass Eye’s “Cake”, etched with the logos of vintage pills from his own youth at the turn of the millennium. These plate-presses included the Teletubbies and BT Cellnet, highlighting a later era of pill branding that was highly culturally and temporally specific in its references, contrasting with more timeless, classic age of Mitsubishis and Doves.

 

This line of research is continued with a poster bringing studio pottery and Ecstasy manufacturers into a previously unheard conversation. The studio marks of Lucie Rie, Emmanuel Cooper, Hans Coper, Marianne de Trey, Janet Leach and Ray Finch are matched with corresponding ‘brands’ of Ecstasy pills, prompting questions about provenance, appropriation and brand recognition.

 

Drawing on further autobiography is another iteration of Bayliss’ ceramic urinals, which at once cheekily reference art history and cultures of masculinity. The text on the toilet bowl reads “So we can be on the same vibe to weave our thoughts into one star I love ya man”, a quotation from a text message Bayliss received from a still unknown number after a rave circa 2002. With a form based on a stainless steel convenience found in a book on nightclub design, Bayliss’ urinal might also allude to recent toxicological techniques of waste-water analysis to estimate population levels of illicit drug use, or perhaps the common phenomena of MDMA-induced penis shrinkage, colloquially known as ‘pilly willy’.

 

Elsewhere, Bayliss continues to play with the iconography of rave. Deep bowls that look much like inverted bucket-hats are replete with graphics seemingly escaped from Cyberdog’s Camden Market stall. These are slip-decorated in a colour palette inspired by Nineties ‘zippy’ magazine Encyclopaedia Psychedelica, edited by early internet theorist Fraser Clark and designed by graphic designers the Scooby Doobies.

 

Finally, Bayliss’ video work slyly places images of potters working at their wheels alongside footage of gurning Ecstasy consumers. The clay judders and shapeshifts in concert with wobbling lips and rolling eyelids. Set to a pounding piano-house soundtrack of Bayliss’ own composition, the effect of this collapsing of two seemingly diametrically-opposed pursuits into a shared visual language is thrilling, jarring, and uneasy. What might the slow, precise, almost meditative practice of pot-throwing have in common with boshing so much MDMA that one is no longer in control of one’s own jaw?

 

Bayliss leaves these questions open, content to let such contradictions and oppositions live and breath in his work. What is shared is a concern with materiality and emotion, with leaving one’s mark.

 

Peder Clark, April 2026, Glasgow

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