I’ve been home for a few weeks now from our tour of Southwest England–barely enough time to begin to put in to words the full import of the experience. The trip was intended purely as a vacation while the girls were at camp this summer. We had promised ourselves since, well, before the girls were born, that we would make this trip and we finally held ourselves to it.
I had figured that some day I would go see the potteries in England that produced the work that most inspired me. I first made that tacit promise probably twenty years ago. But I didn’t want this trip to be only “work focused,” so I picked a few potters to visit that fit in to our plans of wandering rugged coastline while staying at cozy B&B’s. Okay, they happened to be the potteries most important to me to visit, but they are all conveniently scattered from the Cotswolds down to St. Ives.
After a few jet-lagged days of fun in London we headed south. Our intuition told us to visit Salisbury and our radar was quite correct, (even though we had no potters there we planned to visit.) Salisbury Cathedral is not to be missed no matter what your tolerance is for cathedral visiting. Just the choice of the chocolate brown and cream colored stone used to construct its impossibly lofty pillars and vaulting is worth seeing, not to mention the colorful medallions painted at the peak of the presbytery. Nothing is stoney-grey about the place. And because the cathedral was built all at once, so to speak, on the present location, you can visit the ancient foundations of its original structure nearby at Old Sarum. All this is just a few miles south of Stonehenge. To say the area was inspiring is an understatement. Okay, enough travel writing.
On the wise advice from one of our B&B hosts, we drove straight down to St. Ives, near the famous Lands End and Penzance, to beat the beginning of the European summer holiday. We stayed at Hillcrest, the lovely home of Phil and Penny Somer, and walked in to the village to poke around each day. If you’re a potter, you must visit St. Ives. I tell my students that the idea of trying to make handmade pottery would probably never have entered our heads if it hadn’t been for Bernard Leach. No matter what you think of him, he was pottery’s self-appointed champion and did rescue the art and craft of pottery from the bulldozer of the industrial revolution. He introduced the artistry of utilitarian pottery from the Far East and Medieval Europe to generations of eager students all over the world.
Leach’s St. Ives pottery studio is now rightfully a museum and budding workshop for training new potters. As we sat next to his old oil-fired three-chambered kiln, we watched film footage taken of the pottery in the early 1950′s narrated by Warren McKenzie, who worked at St. Ives in those days. I don’t believe I had ever watched footage of Leach throwing. As we were watching, my wife leaned over and whispered, “It’s just like watching you throw.”
I have never really described myself as a “Leach potter” for various reasons, although I have been called that at times. But watching that old film I realized just how much of what I do with clay is directly descended from the old man. I learned from students of his students, both British and American potters, and it is hard to escape those techniques and aesthetic sensibilities. Many other ingredients have been thrown in to the stew over time, but they don’t completely cover up the meat and potatoes. To tell you the truth, I found it moving to accept my connection to that tradition and continue to ponder just what that means for my work.
After soaking up the feel of the propped up old pottery sheds and beautifully contemporary museum attached, I went and talked for a few minutes with a couple of the current students, one American and one English. The idea is to have these potters produce a new range of Standard Ware, as Leach called it, while also having the opportunity to find their own voice in clay and, hopefully, begin to develop a market for it. It is an ambitious undertaking, but then again, so was Leach’s. If nothing else, all potters are tied directly to Leach just by virtue of the fact that we all struggle to make pottery for a world that no longer relies on it daily.
Aside from Cornish pasties and cream teas, a trip to St. Ives requires a stop at St. Ives Ceramics. In London we had a painfully short half-hour at the Victoria & Albert Museum collection of contemporary pottery. But the truth is, John Bedding’s gallery puts that collection to shame. If you want to see the current, and some historic, work of the best potters from the greater Leach family, (so to speak,) this is the place to go.
From St. Ives, we wandered up the north coast to see the crashing surf and crumbling castles and stumbled on the St. Petroc’s B&B run by Linda Frohlic in the village of Trevalga situated right between Tintagel and Boscastle. Linda is a potter as well, and her home is a wonderful collection of pottery, books, art and history. At the breakfast table I could reach behind me and pick up an old Seth Cardew oval dish or a medieval jug from among one collection while my wife found behind her shelves of pottery books. It was a perfect spot to land for a couple of days and wander the rugged coast.
I had wanted to see Svend Bayer’s pottery for some time. If you pay attention to wood firing and wood kilns, you have most likely come across his work. Svend apprenticed with Leach’s first student, Michael Cardew, and has for many years now produced the most elegantly beautiful and timelessly alive wood-fired pieces at his Sheepwash Pottery in Devon. He also has an incredible understanding of wood kiln design and construction, and the kilns he builds are no less works of art than his pots. If you have the chance to build a kiln at one of his workshops around the world, by all means do.
My impression is that Svend works quietly and diligently producing his pieces for his eager market. You won’t find much online advertising how to find him. I had to hunt down Sheepwash on a map, then act as navigator to my wife’s brave driving on the narrow country lanes of England. We stopped in at the small market in the village center and asked how to find Svend’s pottery. A little bit of friendly “up the hill and around the bend” directions from the proprietor and we found his white thatched cottage and blue workshop.
Svend kindly met us in the yard and generously let us look around the place. After a few minutes of simply taking in the largest collection of his work anywhere in such a picturesque setting, Svend found me and we had the most enjoyable talk about being working potters and dealing with wood kilns. My wife and I then picked out the pieces we couldn’t leave without, and figured we could carry home, and left him cutting out arch supports for his next kiln, (which is probably already finished.) It was a wonderful hour I will think about often for a long time to come.
Before we left, Svend took a minute to draw me a map in order to find his neighbor Clive Bowen at Shebbear Pottery. Our timing was not so convenient for Clive, but he still took the time to show us around and seemed to enjoy meeting new people. He has a large bottle kiln with two chambers that he uses to produce the wood-fired earthenware pottery he has been making at Shebbear for forty years, much like his teachers Michaels Leach and Cardew. After meeting him and enjoying the warmth of his beautiful pots and sense of humor, I was even more sorry I had missed his last workshop in my home state of Colorado only a few years ago.
From Shebbear we headed up to Muchelney in the Somerset Levels to visit John Leach’s Muchelney Pottery. I called the night before to see if it would be okay to stop by and, unfortunately, John was not going to be at the pottery the following day. I am still a bit disappointed I didn’t get the chance to meet him in person, but we headed there anyway. I was certain I wanted at least one of his pieces in my luggage. Nick Rees and Mark Melbourne were both working and kindly spent time talking to my wife and me and showing us around.
If you have the romantic notion of building the thriving country pottery in a beautiful setting supported by an international customer base (as I do) then Muchelney is the model to strive for. John may be the only one of the Leach family to really achieve his grandfather’s dream of making elegant functional wood-fired pottery in a standard ware line, as well as making museum quality one-of-a-kind pieces, and having it all actually work.
Nick is delightful to talk to and shared some fun stories of the trials and tribulations of being a potter as he has experienced it at Muchelney over the past 38 years. And I enjoyed watching Mark pull up some tall jugs, one after another. The kiln shed houses a three-chambered kiln and we were lucky to see most of a new load of work spread out on tables ready to head all over the world. Again, it would have been wonderful to meet John, but we had a great time seeing the amazing pottery he and his wife Lizzie have created over the past 45 years.
Our last pottery stop was on our last day. I hadn’t really thought we would make it to Winchcombe Pottery, but as we wandered in the Cotswolds on our way back to London, the road just seemed to take us there without our knowing it. When Michael Cardew left Leach’s pottery in 1926, he rented the old Becketts pottery in Winchcombe. With 63 year old Elijah Comfort and 14 year old Sydney Tustin, he started producing functional pots in the old bottle kiln. (There is a wonderful fictionalized account of this story titled The Snow Firing by Joyce Gard.) Ten years later, Ray Finch joined Cardew and only three years after that, Cardew left the place to Ray. Ray, now in his nineties, still makes pots every day, (as far as I know,) and his son Mike has been working with him since 1968.
We didn’t have much time there, but I could not help but be struck by how familiar the pieces looked to me. The forms and glazes reminded me of the work I used to make at Simon Pearce in Vermont, as well as my own work from earlier years. It has me wondering about that connection from teacher to student and what it is in the subtleties that gets passed along. It isn’t simply “this is how you make this mug,” so much as it is an attitude and belief about what makes a good pot. The strength of the idea of elegant functional ware, made by hand, is the cornerstone to each of these potteries I visited and it is still so compelling to me. Some of the influences to my work I can see directly, like the way John Leach terminates a handle or the shape of Svend Bayer’s jugs. But some of it is just a way of working clay, as my wife noticed in the Leach film.
I have been recalling many moments from the trip over the past few weeks. I expect I will be digesting the import of them for years to come. Perhaps the best part is that these experiences will undoubtedly make their way quietly in to my pots and be passed on to my students.
See, I learned how to make pottery in production studios. Having the opportunity to do a run of production, like these mugs, is really a luxury as far as I’m concerned. And even a little bit nostalgic.
