The state of clay at the V&A

02 October 2009

My interest in the murky world of British studio pottery is a recent one, sparked by a reading of Edmund de Waal’s excellent biography of Bernard Leach. It has proved a dangerous flirtation. Last month I made an eye-wateringly expensive eBay purchase of a set of Leach standard ware — the crockery for everyday use produced to Leach’s designs by the curious assortment of art school graduates, boho-aristos and “local lads” who staffed his St Ives pottery in the middle years of the last century.

Some of the potters who learnt their trade at St Ives, such as Richard Batterham and Leach’s own son David, went on to establish distinguished careers in their own right. I can only assume this was not the case for whichever adolescent yokel was responsible for the wonky, snot-green oddities with which I am now lumbered.

After this bruising experience, I headed to the V&A’s newly refurbished ceramics galleries keen to have my faith restored. This truly spectacular and endlessly captivating display did that and more. The rooms themselves are tremendous — an enfilade of seven spaces of varying scale, ranged along the top floor of the building and lit alternately from above and the side.

Stanton Williams has fitted them out with a family of very elegant vitrines, and augmented the many thousands of items on display with such features as a reconstruction of Lucie Rie’s studio and a small operational pottery with daily demonstrations.

The objects on show are drawn from a 4,000-year span of production from every corner of the globe. Nonetheless, it is Leach who emerges as the pivotal figure. His 1940 treatise A Potter’s Book was one of the first attempts to establish both a canon of pottery and a set of principles to which contemporary potters might adhere. Having himself been apprenticed to a Japanese potter, it was to the east — particularly the work of the Chinese Sung dynasty — that he looked for his measure of artistic excellence. The values encapsulated in his so-called “Sung standard” included a commitment to forms that were true to the materiality of clay, and glazes that had the quality of melted stone. Appropriateness and a sense of necessity were fundamental watchwords. The gallery devoted to the studio pottery tradition demonstrates just how extraordinarily influential Leach’s example proved.

Leach’s prejudices

Indeed, it is hard not to see the form of the V&A display as a reflection of Leach’s enthusiasms and prejudices. The work produced under his influence occupies one of the middle galleries, as do the museum’s holdings of ancient artefacts from Japan, China and Korea, which so inspired him. English slipware — of which Leach was a great supporter and which his own work frequently emulated is also given a central position.

By contrast, 20th century factory-produced ceramics (which Leach was reacting against) and 18th century French decorative porcelain (which A Potter’s Book pointedly ignores) are literally marginalised by being consigned to the two end galleries.

Judged in purely architectural terms, the room given over to contemporary production is quite the most beautiful. The exhibits are distributed around the perimeter of the square plan while a centrally located void allows us to look down to the floor of the main foyer, six storeys below. Its walls are a dark chocolate, serving to highlight the white painted dome above.

Looking up, we find that a shelf, stacked with hundreds of ceramic vessels, has been mounted, frieze-like, around the base of the dome. This is Signs and Wonders, a permanent installation commissioned from de Waal, who as well as being Leach’s biographer is one of the most respected potters of the present generation.

Over the past decade, de Waal has moved away from the production of individual pots to make Morandiesque assemblies of multiple vessels that make an explicit engagement with the architectural spaces in which they are installed. His work is a reminder that the cultures of ceramics and architecture have frequently intersected in the past — and suggests that today’s architects would do well to consider ways in which they might do so again.

Original print headline - The state of clay

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