some english slipwares

SOME ENGLISH SLIPWARES

Crafts Study Centre : Exhibition handlist

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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

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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

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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


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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

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Circular yellow and brown slipware dish, Michael Cardew: see page 22

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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


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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


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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.


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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.



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Slipware jug Michael Cardew, 1930s

Sgraffito decoration through white slip.

From the dinner service commissioned by F. R. Leavis and his wife Queenie.


Circular yellow and brown slipware dish Michael Cardew, early 1930s

Clear iron oxide glaze over sgraffito decoration through white slip.


Oval baking dish Michael Cardew, c. 1930s

Thrown and altered, red earthenware, dark slip and white trailed decoration, galena glaze.



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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.



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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


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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.


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.


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


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Baluster-shaped slipware vase Bernard Leach, 1933–35

Made in Dartington, Devon.


Dish Bernard Leach, 1953

Slipware, sgraffito decoration inside rim. Made in Fujina Pottery, Japan.


Lidded oven dish Frannie Leach, Springfield Pottery, circa 2014

Loan: Frannie Leach


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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


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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.


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


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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


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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


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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

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‘Swirl’ jug, Philip Eglin: see page 24

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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

some english slipwares

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