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Catalogue to accompany the exhibition 'Some English Slipwares' held at the Crafts Study Centre, Farnham, Surrey, October to December 2015.
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SOME ENGLISH SLIPWARES
SOME ENGLISH SLIPWARES
SOME ENGLISH SLIPWARES
Crafts Study Centre : Exhibition handlist
2
Some English Slipwares: 6 October – 12 December 2015
© Crafts Study Centre, University for the Creative Arts, Falkner Road, Farnham, Surrey GU9 7DS
Curator: Professor Simon Olding
Curatorial support: Jean Vacher
Design: David Hyde
Technical support: Hannah Facey and Peter Vacher
Administration: Margaret Madden and Ingrid Stocker
Transport: Mark Watson Transport; Oxford Gallery
The Crafts Study Centre is extremely grateful to the following makers, collectors and museums who have generously loaned work to the exhibition: Hampshire Cultural Trust; Professsor Alice Kettle; Michael OBrien; Sandy Brown; Philip Leach; Frannie Leach; Geraldine Richmond-Watson; Joanna Wason; Basil Woodd-Walker; Julia Quigley; Philip Eglin; James Fordham, Oxford Gallery; Ceramics Collection and Archive, Aberystwyth University.
Some English Slipwares
3
CONTENTS
What is slipware? ....................................................................................................... 5
Introduction .............................................................................................................. 6
Place, tradition and iconography: Bernard Leach and Simon Carroll ............................. 7
The exhibits ............................................................................................................. 18
Philip Leach: Jug making – a Bernard Leach grandson approach ................................ 30
Joanna Wason ........................................................................................................... 34
Slipware dish, Michael Cardew: see page 19
4
Crafts Study Centre : Exhibition handlist
Square vase with rounded feet, Simon Carroll: see page 23
WHAT IS SLIPWARE?‘What is meant by “slipware”? It sounds like skating
or sliding, not like pottery…Firstly, it is lead-glazed
earthenware – firing temperature between 8900C
and 11000C. Secondly, the pots are decorated with
coloured “slip” before they are fired in the kiln.
Slip is clay mixed with water…All work that is
earthenware and decorated in any way with slips
before firing is called slipware’.
Mary Wondrausch, Mary Wondrausch on Slipware (2001),
A&C Black, p.7
Some English Slipwares
5
Crafts Study Centre : Exhibition handlist
6
This exhibition reflects on the development of
slipware in English studio ceramics from the 1920s
to the present day. It takes as a starting point a
slipware jug from Bideford, North Devon dated
1843. 19th century slipware pieces such as this
inspired the early studio potters, Bernard Leach,
Hamada Shoji and Michael Cardew. Leach stated
that Cardew ‘along with Hamada and I, rescued
English slip-ware from entire loss’, and their creative
intervention can be felt through to work made in
the 21st century. The exhibition places early studio
work alongside contemporary pieces, both to
establish how a tradition is kept alive, and how it is
challenged and subverted. It shows how domestic
jugs can both serve a function and a message.
The exhibition presents work that operates within
a convention of slipware decoration, and it shows
how the fluidity and risk of the technique can
be utilized with artistic freedom and spontaneity.
There are rare examples of slipware by potters who
only made in this technique occasionally (Henry
Hammond and Katherine Pleydell-Bouverie, for
example). Contemporary makers such as Sandy
Brown, Simon Carroll and Alison Britton have used
their knowledge of slipware technique and history
to create inventive and entirely original forms.
INTRODUCTION
Some English Slipwares
7
Bernard Leach
In the 1920s, Bernard Leach made a series of large,
slip-decorated earthenware plates. Nothing like
these plates had been made in England since the
late 17th century, when Thomas Toft in Burslem,
Staffordshire and his fellow makers produced
magnificent slipware chargers. Some 40 of these
works, dating back to the 1670s, and signed by
Toft, still survive. His designs include mermaids,
unicorns and pelicans; portraits of King Charles II
and Queen Catherine and coats of arms. They are
marked with a cross-hatched rim. They resonate
with a national iconography and narrative. They are
celebratory, vigorous in conception and execution.
They commonly offer praise: the praise of a system
of royalty or of folk lore.
Bernard Leach came across these bold, dynamic
pots in 1913, four years into his first extensive period
of residence as a young man in Japan, and some two
years after his first exposure to the craft of pottery.
He was still working through his ideas as a potter,
searching for an accommodation of style, motif,
materials and form, doing this through the means
of practice, consultation and experimentation. He
was also very persistent as a researcher, and artifact
study and the study of images of work informed
his practice. He regularly spent time in museums
and commercial galleries in Tokyo, and he was a
critical reader.
The 17th century slipware chargers reached
their apogee in Ralph and Thomas Toft’s and Ralph
Simpson’s work – vital and rapidly composed
plates intended as special commemorative pieces
made for weddings or christenings and intended
for proud display as family heirlooms. The figures
that appeared on them were drawn, as Emmanuel
Cooper says, ‘with little or no regard for anatomical
detail’. The compositions fill the whole well of
the plate and are characterized by a successful
combination of abstract and figurative designs, and
very often lettering appears on the rim: Thomas
Toft’s name, for example, plus a date.
One significant source for Leach’s study of these
slipwares was a book by Charles J Lomax, Quaint
Old English Pottery, which had been purchased for
him by his artist friend Tomimoto. Lomax’s book
had been privately published in 1909. It was a major
source book for Leach. Quaint Old English Pottery
provided a commentary on a private collection
drawn together by Charles Lomax of English
place, tradition and iconography
Crafts Study Centre : Exhibition handlist
8
earthenware, featuring the works of Thomas Toft
and his family and fellow potters. It stirred Leach,
and stimulated his desire to make slipware both in
Japan and in St Ives. The ‘devices and decorative
treatments’ to use Emmanuel Cooper’s phrase are
explicitly derived from such slipwares.
Leach’s first experimental work in slipware, perhaps
his very first, is seen on this little plate, 21 centimetres
wide, dating from 1917, now in a private collection.
It reveals something of Leach’s intense urge to cover
surface: to crowd it with a fluid imagery and text,
as if to load the plate with thought and reference,
and then to free it from this dense context by his
depiction of the bird’s rapid flight. It is as if his mind is
in tumult, and this tiny surface is all he has to express
himself: as a painter, a reader, a critic and student of
pottery. This exceptionally rare plate, made in Japan,
is a precursor to his large chargers of the 1920s. The
little bird, perhaps a dove, perhaps the symbolic bird
of peace, perhaps a sky lark, perhaps the precursor
to an elegant cormorant that flies across many of
his pots across his long career, is in a kind of rapt
flight. The quotation form William Blake’s prophetic
Book of Urizen reminds us of the significance of the
mystical poet to Leach and to his Japanese friends
and artists. Soetsu Yanagi, for example, published a
massive volume on Blake in 1914, the first in Japan,
dedicating it to Leach. It was a cultural exchange.
But there was also an economic dimension to these
interplays. Leach wrote in A Potter’s Outlook that:
‘having become a potter in Japan – a land still new
to the affairs of industrialization – I did not realize
the chasm which a century of factories had torn
between ordinary life and hand crafts such as mine.
I thought that, as in Japan, the work would speak
for itself. But I have been forced to the conclusion
that, except for the very few, this is not the case,
and that unless the potter, weaver, wheelwright or
other craftsman, tells his own tale, no one else will
or can do it for him’.
And so, in this precursive Japanese-made plate,
Leach finds that slip-trailing from 17th century
England gives him the essential means to draw
together the creative forces of literature and poetry,
and through drawing and writing in slip, he can
express the individuality of the hand made on the
simplest of domestic forms. It is a remarkable little
plate: one in which pace, enquiry and reflection are
all in flux. This may be a Staffordshire pot as much
as a Japanese one. Leach was reflecting on images
Some English Slipwares
9
of Thomas Toft’s slipware chargers and other wares
made at Burslem at the same time, and their role
as exemplars of an English ‘folk art’. Emmanuel
Cooper asserts that ‘their unselfconscious sense of
pattern, inventive interpretation and the placing of
bold designs struck him as a successful blend of
skill and intuitive aesthetic handling’. Leach made
at least one larger slipware charger in Japan, a Hare
Dish in raku in 1919, now in the collection of the
Japan Folk Craft Museum in Tokyo. He gave it to
his lifelong friend Soetsu Yanagi and said ‘this was
my first attempt after having started making pots
in an alien country to get my feet on the ground
of English tradition’. He was doing so here by
synthesis and study, and he began to realize in 1919
that he could ‘make pottery under circumstances
which offer unusually favourable opportunities for
the development of his art’. This he would do, from
1920 onwards, in St Ives.
Leach slipware chargers formed an important
part of his output at the Leach Pottery in Cornwall
throughout the 1920s. He followed the style of
Thomas Toft by giving them a cross hatched rim
and he sometimes signed his works on the rim,
as Toft had done before him. But his imagery is
remarkable for its individuality, its melding of
English and Japanese iconography. He depicts a
Japanese Well head; a Griffin from English heraldry;
the tree of life; the Pelican in her Piety; a deer,
an owl, this last plate placed above the fireplace in
the Leach Pottery. Sometimes these images were
embedded in the mythology of Cornwall as in the
Mermaid of Zennor plate, a dish that for a moment
in time Leach intended as a gift to the Crafts Study
Centre collection, although it was passed to his son
David instead, and is now in the collection of the
Harris Museum, Preston.
Leach’s slipwares fuse culture: East and West.
They fuse time: the chargers of the 1920s could
not have been made without reference to those
of the 1680s. They use the techniques that were
appropriate for the job at hand: raku firings at first,
the use of Red Devon Clay. They are transitional
pots. They were also notoriously difficult to make
without error. They often simply exploded in the
kiln or misfired. They are prone to damage and
often carry deep firing cracks. The glaze does not
always cover the surface of the slip painting. But
they are also joyous exemplars of vernacular art,
and just occasionally after the 1920s, Leach would
Crafts Study Centre : Exhibition handlist
10
make a slipware piece perhaps to remind himself of
their potency and the vital role they played in the
development of his practice and his search for an
independent artistic voice.
The slipware chargers were also important
because they laid out a template for a related
series of large plates he made in the 1920s with
iron brushwork rather than slip painting, including
one work in the Crafts Study Centre’s collections
showing Bali shadow puppets.
Leach was to say that ‘only in the remnants of
folk life and folk culture will you find what I call
pattern. It’s comparable to metaphors, to poems,
to tools, little abstract simplifications of sound,
colours, shapes which can be repeated quickly as
in music or dance or in poetic couplets. William
Blake’s are good examples’.
As a postscript to Bernard Leach’s slipwares,
I want to remark, briefly, on the way that he
displayed one charger, in particular. I mean his owl
plate, which was situated in the corner fireplace
of the Leach Pottery. Two Tang figures from his
personal collection of ceramics were placed in the
niches above the fireplace. It was a place where
Leach settled and performed the role of the pottery
master, explaining the finer points of making a jug,
plate or mug to his assistants. The Owl charger took
pride of place here. After Leach’s death, and perhaps
around the time of Janet Leach’s death, these two
Tang figures and the owl charger disappeared from
the pottery into a private collection in St Ives:
perhaps donated by Leach. The Leach Pottery
decided some years ago to clear and stabilize the
fireplace so that it could be lit again, and in the spirit
of recapturing the special significance of this micro
site, took steps to reconstruct the tableau of pots
that had played such vital testimony to the sense
of place and the idea of conversing about ceramics
in the sight of exemplar works. The Leach Pottery
commissioned Philip Leach (who was born in Four
Marks, Hampshire in 1947), Bernard’s grandson, to
make a slipware charger to take the place of the
original. Philip takes up the story:
‘Making jugs in the old Leach Pottery St Ives.
Full to the brim with memories: Bill Marshall,
Scot Marshall, Paul Vibert, Horatio Dunn, Uncle
David, my Dad to name a few. Mr Laposter, now,
how did you spell his name, a gardener taught me
to pull up stinging nettles, just grab them hard!
No, it didn’t seem to work. The owl platter was
Some English Slipwares
11
quite a curiosity because Bernard’s original platter
was heavily influenced I think by an owl from The
Slipware Book which inspired a lot of his work at
that time…His owl was quite comical – brush
drawn, tinted possibly with an iron wash and glazed
in galena, I think.
I decided to go for a trailed platter white slip
on black and a honey glaze. Throwing in the old
workshop my back was near an incredibly cold
damp wall and by the third morning I had managed
to tear a muscle in my lower back. I realized that
working out of my comfort zone I was having
problems achieving the size of platter for this
project. A bit of potter’s bad luck crept in and the
kiln managed to crack the two best plates so I was
unable to have a worthy piece for the opening of
the fireplace. I thoroughly enjoyed the interaction
with the visitors passing through and had some
good chats…I have just read the correspondence
between Yanagi and Bernard from 1912–1958
and together with my own experience now I feel
the Leach Pottery has very much a life of its own.
I have persevered and thrown four more platters
now measuring about 16 inches and finished one
which I think is worthy of the fireplace’.
Simon Carroll
It may seem like a cultural wrench to take you
from the Leach Pottery to Simon Carroll, but I
want to make a case for such a juxtaposition. I can
bring geography in to my argument. Bernard Leach
settled, as we know, famously in St Ives in 1920
to establish the Leach Pottery. Simon Carroll set
up his first studio in his home town of Hereford,
but eventually relocated to Cornwall in 2004.
Here, he rented an unprepossessing but serviceable
Nissen Hut in a disused old airfield near Padstow.
Carroll described, in an early artist’s statement, his
journey from making domestic wares through to
the dramatic, vibrant, sculptural vessels with which
he made his reputation as a ceramic artist resonate.
In this early artist’s statement he discussed this
transition in his practice as well as the significance
of his observation of early English slipwares and
the part they played in his creative work:
‘I have been working from traditional hand-made
pottery for a while, mainly ‘panchions’, large old
storage pots glazed on the inside and once used in
sculleries and kitchens for holding flour and cream.
I like to consider the potters who made them,
their way of life, attitudes and approaches to the
Crafts Study Centre : Exhibition handlist
12
clay, which I feel they probably saw as churning
out the carrier bags of their time, having good days
and bad days and leaving visible evidence of their
experience in their pots; scratches, finger marks,
cracks and foreign bodies which affected the glazes.
For my most recent work I have looked into
17th and 18th century slipware, visiting museums
to see the pots in the flesh and speaking to the
experts to find out exactly how they were made.
I am now attempting to create pots in the same
way, while adding a few ingredients of my own.
I throw my pots using raku, white stoneware, red
clay or combinations of these mixed with a large
amount of smashed up house brick or tile, which
I usually leave thick. I decorate these with white,
black and red slip and when they are almost dry
I use an old wood saw to cut it up and break off
pieces, leaving isolated decoration on the fragments.
Each piece is raw glazed and fired to about 1020
to 1060 degrees Centigrade. After firing I examine
what I have and re-fire the pieces, adding more
glaze in places. Finally I reassemble the pot’.
The great flowering of these tortured ‘slipwares’
(Carroll called them, variously, tall vases, thrown
square pots, short vases or thrown square vase
on pointed feet, for example) came in 2005 in
preparation for his one person touring exhibition
curated by Emmanuel Cooper for Tate St Ives.
It ended its tour at the Crafts Study Centre in
2007. The Tate curators of the show, Sara Hughes
and Susan Daniel-McElroy remarked that these
works had ‘a compelling unpredictability…whilst
firmly rooted in the traditions of English slipware,
these works are not politely nostalgic and subvert
any expectations of the ubiquitous pot or the
perfect form’. Emmanuel Cooper also notes how
Carroll’s observation of the history of ceramics,
and particularly English slipwares, underpins his
‘understanding and inventive use of material and in
the fantasy of figurative, floral and abstract mark-
making. His loose, free approach to creating work…
is part of a paradoxical quest for both freedom and
control, for suggestion and statement’.
One might say that what Simon Carroll has
taken from slipware is its spontaneity, the need for
speed in the mark making, its risk and its joyful
expressiveness. Slipware is not an art of restraint
here. Carroll prefers an abstract line, although in
some commanding vases a leaf like pattern, deeply
gouged into the clay, appears. These are profoundly
Some English Slipwares
13
manipulated vessels: hit at, punched at, wrestled
and fought over in the manner of Peter Voulkos,
for example. Then they are slip-painted with
honey and tin glazes. Patches of red earthenware
are left untouched, sometimes, to contrast with
the free marking and abandoned painting. Every
vessel seems both totemically still and feverishly
full of movement. Emmanuel Cooper remarks
how Carroll’s pots ‘freely thrown, wobbly and
wayward, are decorated with spots and drizzles
of glaze and splashes of slip in compositions that
have all the dynamism and abandon of a Jackson
Pollok action painting’. They are pots of Cornwall
by way of American Abstract Expressionism.
Carroll’s major touring show for Tate St Ives took
these cultural references into play with even more
vigour: Elizabethan ruffs, 18th century porcelains,
decoration on Oribe Wares from Japan are all
introduced. He wrote in 2002 that ‘it has always
been a good practice for artists to draw and look
at tradition. I believe this to be fundamental and
enriching’.
And it is in this reimagining of slipware that
Simon Carroll’s hand reaches down the 20 miles
of coast from Padstow to St Ives and touches
Leach’s. They both, it seems to me, assimilated a
tradition by observation, contemplation, handling
and reading. They respected this convention and
then ignored aspects of its. They interpreted it in
uniquely personal ways.
Why is this important to the Crafts Study
Centre?
First, and prosaically, because the Centre has long
held an ambition to acquire a work by Simon Carroll
for the collections: both to represent a significant
contemporary maker with a fine piece, but also as a
counterpoint to our collection of modern slipwares
by Leach and Michael Cardew, who contributed
so significantly to the development of the genre.
And then to stand up against the works by Dylan
Bowen and Clive Bowen that we have acquired
more recently.
The work we have acquired is called Square
Vessel with Rounded Feet and was recently displayed
in Simon Carroll’s retrospective exhibition
‘Simon Carroll: Expressionist Potter’, at the
Victoria & Albert Museum and then touring to
the Ruthann Craft Centre. The expert advisors
on our Acquisition Committee, Alison Britton
Crafts Study Centre : Exhibition handlist
14
and Felicity Aylieff, have been champions of this
purchase. Felicity wrote about Carroll in support of
the grant applications that he was ‘one of a handful
of artist potters to recognize and use the wheel
as a creative tool. His inventive and often radical
approach towards the generation of form and the
application of coloured slips and glazes has had an
enormous influence on many who have followed’.
To my mind, Carroll’s dominance over clay and the
abandoned moment of making is replicated in the
work of Sandy Brown, Ashley Howard and Gareth
Mason amongst contemporary potters.
I made this case to our potential funders (the Art
Fund and the V&A Museum Purchase Fund):
‘The work by Simon Carroll is expressive, gnarled,
fought over and radical in its shape. Its painting
and slip trailing and scorings are done intuitively
and at speed. They carry the powerful trace of the
hand, not content with a graceful or mannered line,
or the need to control the slip trailer with over
precision. This is like painting with watercolour:
once the mark is applied, it has to stay in place.
Everything depends on the moment. One can
argue that immediacy and spontaneity are the
mark of all studio slipware. Pieces in the Centre’s
collections include Pool by Alison Britton, in a style
more carefully composed than Carroll’s. Works by
Clive Bowen (a large bread bin and vase) contain
naturalistic imagery as well as free, abstract lines, but
they are expressly functional works. Alison Britton
says that “Simon Carroll had an extraordinary
verve with the practice of throwing and took it
into new and inspiriting territory. But beyond this,
and outstanding in my view, was the way the freely
painted surface developed with the bravura of the
forms, was built up and clawed into by his hands,
sloshed with slip and glaze, keeping a sense of the
plasticity of clay. This work expresses many of his
painter/sculptor concerns in its formal variations
from plane to plane”’.
Conclusion
Leach and Carroll are unlikely companions. But in
the re-imagining of English slipware in the 1920s
and in the first decade of the 21st century, they
found common cause as artist potters. The faint
spirit of Thomas Toft hovers behind them: and the
English tradition of slipware has been immeasurably
enriched by what they have achieved. These
magnificent and individualistic works also pay due
Some English Slipwares
15
reference to the potters of the past, and unleash
their own sense of the worlds of painting, literature
and the home.
As one critic of Leach’s famously said of an
exhibition held in Japan in the 1920s: ‘we admire
your stoneware – influenced by the East – but we
love your English slipware – born, not made’.
Simon Olding, 10 June 2015
Edited from the lecture given to the symposium
Shima Kara Shima E, 4 December 2014, held at
the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham,
commissioned by the symposium director Ashley
Howard.
Shallow bowl, Henry Hammond: see page 25
16
Crafts Study Centre : Exhibition handlist
Circular yellow and brown slipware dish, Michael Cardew: see page 22
17
Some English Slipwares
Crafts Study Centre : Exhibition handlist
18
Slipware jug Bideford, North Devon, dated 1843
Loan: Hampshire Cultural Trust
CRH 1968.121.3
Earthenware jar Paul Barron, 1950s
Paul Barron taught at the West Surrey College of Art & Design, Farnham from 1949–82 with Henry Hammond, and he shared a studio with Hammond in Bentley, Hampshire. Barron has used red earthenware clay covered with white slip and sgraffito decoration. The jar was donated to Harold and Doreen Cheesman in the 1950s when Harold was a lecturer at the Farnham School of Art.
Loan: Julia Quigley
Tall, lidded jar Clive Bowen, circa 1990s
Thrown, earthenware, sgraffito and painted decoration, honey coloured glaze. Winchcombe recipe type.Crafts Study Centre 2011.15.a-b
THE EXHIBITS
Some English Slipwares
19
Thrown and altered vessel Dylan Bowen, circa 2013
Dark brown and cream slip, combed decoration below neck.Crafts Study Centre 2013.10
‘Pool’ Alison Britton, 2012
Built in slabs of red earthenware with poured slip and glaze.‘It was first fired to 11800C, is made of Keupers Red Earthenware, and the poured areas are first slip and then after biscuit firing, clear and coloured glaze, refired to 11000C.’ (Alison Britton)
Crafts Study Centre 2014.21
‘Sgraffito scribble’ Sandy Brown, 2014
This vessel was made by Sandy Brown during a ceramic firing organized by John Edgler at Bideford in 2014. She has added an image of a rowing boat to denote her long standing activity as a rower.
Loan: Sandy Brown
Crafts Study Centre : Exhibition handlist
20
Slipware plate Michael Cardew, ‘River Pattern’, circa 1970
Michael OBrien bought the plate directly from Michael Cardew when he was leaving Wenford Bridge in 1974. He notes that ‘it had probably been up in his office (ie not for sale) for a couple of years. It is made from the Wenford throwing body with combing through white slip and glazed with the then ‘Standard’ glaze, a slip-glaze and fired to Cone 8 B’.
Loan: Michael OBrien
Slipware jug Michael Cardew
Loan: Michael OBrien
Oval dish Michael Cardew, 1930s
Slipware, Winchcombe Pottery.
From the dinner service commissioned by the literary critic and Cambridge academic F. R. Leavis.
Some English Slipwares
21
Slipware dish Michael Cardew, 1930s
Moulded, trailed slip decoration.
Crafts Study Centre P.74.66
Large teapot with a cane handle Michael Cardew, c. 1935
Earthenware, red body, galena glaze over all excluding unglazed rim to lid and band at base.
P.74.124
Plate Michael Cardew, 1930s
Slipware, red body, combed decoration within circle.
Crafts Study Centre P.74.56
Crafts Study Centre : Exhibition handlist
22
Slipware jug Michael Cardew, 1930s
Sgraffito decoration through white slip.
From the dinner service commissioned by F. R. Leavis and his wife Queenie.
Crafts Study Centre P.82.4
Circular yellow and brown slipware dish Michael Cardew, early 1930s
Clear iron oxide glaze over sgraffito decoration through white slip.
Crafts Study Centre P.82.1
Oval baking dish Michael Cardew, c. 1930s
Thrown and altered, red earthenware, dark slip and white trailed decoration, galena glaze.
Crafts Study Centre 2009.1
Some English Slipwares
23
Set of five soup bowls Michael Cardew, early 1930s
Slip-trailed decoration under honey-coloured glaze. Part of a dinner service that was commissioned by the literary critic F. R. Leavis and his wife Queenie.
Crafts Study Centre P.82.5.a-e
Square vase with rounded feet Simon Carroll, 2005
Hand-built vessel, slip and glaze. Purchased with the support of funds from the Art Fund and the V&A Museum Purchase Fund.
Crafts Study Centre 2015.8
Crafts Study Centre : Exhibition handlist
24
Jug ‘Slipping the Trail’ Philip Eglin, 2015
Made for a solo exhibition for the Ceramic Centre and Archive, Aberystwyth University, ‘Slipping the Trail & Responding to the Buckley Pottery in the Aberystwyth Collection’, 2015 and then touring in 2016.
Loan: Philip Eglin with thanks to the Ceramic Centre and Archive, Aberystwyth University and the Oxford Gallery
‘Swirl’ jug Philip Eglin, 2015
Made for a solo exhibition for the Ceramic Centre and Archive, Aberystwyth University, ‘Slipping the Trail & Responding to the Buckley Pottery in the Aberystwyth Collection’, 2015 and then touring in 2016.
Loan: Philip Eglin with thanks to the Ceramic Centre and Archive, Aberystwyth University and the Oxford Gallery
Pitcher jug W Fishley-Holland, 1949
Slipware, sgrafffito decoration of a farm and animals round form. ‘Fill me with liquor sweet for that is good when friends do meet. When friends do meet & liquor plenty - fill me again when I.B.M.T.’ inscribed around form beneath handle. ‘To Bernard Leach from W. Fishley Holland Potter 1949’ inscribed at foot.Part of Bernard Leach reference collectionCrafts Study Centre P.79.65
Some English Slipwares
25
Large dish T.S. (Sam) Haile, 1945-6
Slipware with white slip trailed decoration under a clear glaze and black slip over a red earthenware clay body.
Crafts Study Centre P.80.2
Shallow bowl Henry Hammond, 1946–51
Turned foot, earthenware, red clay body, black slip coated interior, transparent glaze, white slip trailed decoration in a stylized leaf pattern over a resist outline.
Crafts Study Centre P.89.5
Large harvest jug
The textile artist Alice Kettle and the potter Alex McErlain often collaborated when they worked together at Manchester Metropolitan University. Their interest in collaboration was also made explicit in the ‘Pairings’ exhibition (Stroud International Textiles) as they sought to create ‘a dialogue between makers and materials in order to learn and understand an alternative perspective and reflect back on one’s own’.
Loan: Professor Alice Kettle
Crafts Study Centre : Exhibition handlist
26
Baluster-shaped slipware vase Bernard Leach, 1933–35
Made in Dartington, Devon.
Crafts Study Centre P.75.46
Dish Bernard Leach, 1953
Slipware, sgraffito decoration inside rim. Made in Fujina Pottery, Japan.
Crafts Study Centre P.75.44
Lidded oven dish Frannie Leach, Springfield Pottery, circa 2014
Loan: Frannie Leach
Some English Slipwares
27
Large jug Philip Leach, Springfield Pottery, circa 2014
Experimenting with pouring and marbelling with black and white slips, then adding brushed on colours before glazing in a borax glaze, electric kiln firing.
Loan: Geraldine Richmond-Watson
Trailed bowl Philip Leach, Springfield Pottery, 2015
‘I made the bowl shortly after watching Michael Cardew throw a bowl when he was practically in his 80s on a video clip. He slowly thumped the clay on a wheel into a fairly even ring, and then with a slurry mix threw up the bowl on an old kick wheel. It was great to listen and to watch’.
Loan: Philip Leach
Large jug with Minoan and traditional influences Philip Leach, Springfield Pottery, 2015
Hakeme brushed white slip over black, slip trailed octopus fully round the jug, poured honey lead bisilicate glaze with copper blue alkaline glaze overlapping, reduction firing in gas kiln bringing out the red copper.
Loan: Philip Leach
Crafts Study Centre : Exhibition handlist
28
Large dish Katharine Pleydell-Bouverie, 1961
Brown and white slipware, clear glaze over trailed and combed white slip decoration on interior, unglazed with incised decoration on exterior.
Crafts Study Centre P.84.7
Two harvest jugs Emilie Taylor, 2014
Emilie Taylor was artist in residence at Manor Estate, Sheffield and Chatsworth Estate, Derbyshire in a project led by Yorkshire Artspace. Stoker Devonshire writes that ‘Emilie has brought together what were once both Cavendish Estates, by contrasting The Manor today with historic decoration from the Chatsworth in the Baroque age’. This juxtaposition of a great historic house and a low rise housing estate with acute levels of social depravation enables her to use a conventional commemorative style on a standard ceramic shape, some with contemporary images that as Sara Roberts says are ‘provocative and politically challenging’. These jugs contrast the items requested to be donated to the growing number of free food banks on the Manor with the grocery items available at the Chatsworth organic shop.
Loan: Basil Woodd-Walker
Some English Slipwares
29
Plate Joanna Wason, 2015
Made for a solo exhibition at the Leach Pottery.
Loan: Joanna Wason Cider jar Mary Wondrausch, circa 1976
The jar commemorates the Silver Jubilee of Elizabeth II, and is decorated with images of Elizabeth I, Elizabeth II and the Royal Coat of Arms. Mary Wondrausch is renowned for her contribution to the development of slipware both through her significant book ‘Mary Wondrausch on Slipware’ and other writings and the slipwares made at her studio in Compton, Surrey.
Loan: Hampshire Cultural Trust
Two vases Joanna Wason, 2015
Made for a solo exhibition at the Leach Pottery.
Loan: Joanna Wason
Crafts Study Centre : Exhibition handlist
30
Jug making:
a Bernard Leach grandson approach
Not stuck in a traditional slipware rut
As a child I remember growing up, a Leach water
jug was on the dinner table the handle springing
from about half way between the middle and the
top and attaching a hand’s width down the jug,
a barrel form, stoneware glazed over a dark slip
outside, a well formed spout quite a homely form.
Much later when I first began throwing jugs
with Clive Bowen the handle sprang from the jug’s
rim or a little bit below there was a neck and the
handle tended to find a point on the shoulder of
the bellied base. My father, possibly quoting, said
the adage that a good handle can save a pot. I prefer
the handle to be roughly pre-pulled before I take
it to the jug, and then finally pulled on the form to
give a spring to the handle and corrections to its
thickness before attaching it to the jug.
I seem to prefer the traditional North Devon
slipware jug form whether throwing small or large.
There is something exciting about jug throwing,
especially with the Fremington clay which allows
you to take the thrown cylinder and then with
your left hand inside, right hand out, thrust out the
belly as the neck starts to sink a little. The elasticity
in that clay is very forgiving and when you look
from the 10lb clay lump to the finished jug there is
a thrill. Throwing and coiling on large pieces I can
understand but I prefer the challenge of throwing
largish jugs in one, without producing the the gas
bottle and loads of flame and steam. North Devon
jugs, made to carry water, cider and also carrying
records of events, pottery poems and drawings
from the very small to the large, fat Harvest Jugs.
The history of the Harvest Jug, my take being, the
potter would make one or two a year in the summer
months when the evenings were long. Free thrown
jugs with combed slip, or a good simple glaze,
maybe some flashing in the kiln can be a very fine
form and carry the same weight and poise as the
integrity in a Japanese tea-bowl. We have two very
good jug makers in North Devon – Clive Bowen
and Sven Bayer.
I was drawn to the vitality of earthenware
even though I grew up surrounded by some
beautiful tenmoku, celadon and ash glazes –
white china plates were a rare thing! I have a
rather poor knowledge of chemistry (physics-
PHILIP LEACH
Some English Slipwares
31
with-chemistry ‘O’ level grade 6) but have
experimented with low temperature glazes. I’m
receptive to influences from my travels and quite
happily bring those to my work. During my early
years whilst trying to escape from ‘pottery’ and
‘Leach’ I ended up in Iran for six years. There
I found the copper blue alkaline glaze which
was a great excitement and you might say has
become a trade mark to our pottery (Springfield
Pottery). More recently, my wife Frannie and
I were visiting Crete where we not only saw the
magnificent Larnaxes and jugs with birdlike spouts
decorated with flowing octopi, but we also came
across a beautiful 15-inch 12th-century Persian
dish glazed in a clear alkaline glaze over delicately
painted floral pattern in cobalts and copper. We
were also able to dig up Minoan and Roman
shards at an ancient palace site on a mountain top.
We came back inspired and enthused, tried out a
new glaze.
To work with other potters and artists is
something I’ve ventured into and we collaborated
with a German artist, Matti Braun, who wanted me
to throw large platters so he could use the Palette
of our glazes and colours. He also wanted to add
more colours and I was keen to move into that
territory. I remember in my teens drawing an old
shed in a mine workings, and then colouring each
panel with blocks of different colours – this was
met by furious rage from my dad for some reason!
I still seem to want to challenge the working surface
with some distraction.
With two of my latest jugs, I’ve tried the Minoan
form with their characteristic pouring lip, with
white slip I trailed an octopus over the entire jug
over a brushed-on black slip. A challenge! The slip
was a little runny. After the biscuit firing with a
large ladle – the Japanese use handled bamboo
ladles for glazing – I poured down the jug streams
alternately of Honey LBS and Blue Alkaline glazes.
The result was exciting, good quality glaze, a lot of
copper reduction where the copper blue glaze has
thinned over the honey glaze, the gas kiln is great
for that.
Large jug with Minoan and traditional influences, Philip Leach: see page 27
32
Crafts Study Centre : Exhibition handlist
‘Swirl’ jug, Philip Eglin: see page 24
33
Some English Slipwares
Crafts Study Centre : Exhibition handlist
34
I grew up in North Devon, near Bideford where
for at least four hundred years slipware has been
made for local use and for export. Bideford library
had a permanent display of old slipware jugs which
I always really liked. Now the Burton Art Gallery
in Bideford houses the amazing R. J. Lloyd slipware
collection.
Having made a few pots and figurative sculptures
since the early 1970s, I came to work for Janet Leach
in 1988, mixing her clays and glazes, making saggars
for her special smoke firings and acting as her general
workshop assistant until her death in 1997.
I continued to make pots in the old Leach
Pottery workshop until it was converted into the
Leach Pottery Museum and I moved my wheel
into an old showman’s caravan once belonging to
a Danish circus but now on Penwith moor where
I live. It became my workshop, complete with its
cut-glass light-fittings, sturdy plank flooring and
beautifully rounded and finished features. Sadly
that old caravan gradually collapsed and was
replaced by a rather charmless static caravan made
of flimsier aluminium, and colder than the old one,
even though the door of this one shuts without the
need of an old railway sleeper leaning against it!
My gas kiln is in a granite shed. My porcelain
pots are wheel-thrown and usually glazed with
white or ash glazes, which show up well on the pale
porcelain. My stoneware pots are thrown, formed
over ‘hump moulds’, or slabbed, and they are usually
decorated with iron rich glaze or ash glaze. Both
the porcelain and the stoneware pots are fired to
1280 degrees C in a reduction atmosphere in a gas
kiln. These clays are from John Doble, whose sand
and clay pit is just outside St. Agnes.
The terracotta pots are sometimes thrown, but
more often slabbed and constructed. The terracotta
dishes are thrown or formed in slump moulds. The
terracotta pots are decorated with coloured slips,
glazed with honey or transparent glaze, and fired to
1080 degrees C in an electric kiln.
JOANNA WASON