Byron Temple, Romantic Pragmatist   1      2      3      4      5      6      7      8      -      PRINTER VERSION

>> owned by a childhood friend in Louisville. He pared his life down to its essence in the same way he pared down his pots, nothing extraneous, nothing to get in the way, always focused and to the point. He rented a studio across the river in Indiana from a young potter and renewed his acquaintance with Gil Stengil, who now had a wood kiln in Indiana. Stengil asked Temple if he would like to fire with him and after looking at the kind of firings Stengil was doing, Temple began a series of work that he felt would best suit that particular kind of firing. Much of the 1990s were consumed with traveling; He spent three months in Australia and New Zealand in 1991 and six months in New Zealand in 1994. In 1995 he was invited to work at the European Ceramics Work Centre in Holland and in 1996 he was invited to be a visiting artist at the Shigaraki Ceramic Park in Shigaraki, Japan.

My solution is not to make history roll backward as has been attempted, but go forward. Old fashioned craftsmanship is not copying (historical) forms but lies in a profound comprehension of the way in which they were created; a deep preoccupation with functional utility, a respectful fidelity to the requirements of the material and a lively desire to express the collective sensitivity of society.       —Byron Temple

The key to understanding Temple's work is to appreciate what it means to work within a system or set of ideas while at the same time trying to expand the framework that holds that system together. Temple saw pottery as a particular form of expression. It is not that he thought that pottery was better or morally superior to either the post-modern vessel or ceramic sculpture, which dominated the modern craft scene throughout his career. They were merely different, like apples and oranges, not to be compared in the same way. It was not only his insistence on making useful pottery, but also his reductive approach to work; his desire to pare a work down until all that was left was pure feeling, that rankled his critics and put him at odds with the modern craft movement. The main reason he rejected the modern craft's embrace of the "art for art's sake" argument was that it summarily dismissed pottery from consideration as an idiom of artistic expression in its own right. Temple had found pottery through its usefulness and his life was changed forever because of that encounter. Pottery's connection with our physical existence was a never-ending source of inspiration to Temple. Octavio Paz wrote in the essay "Seeing and Using: Art and Craftsmanship", "The handmade object does not charm us simply because of its usefulness. It lives in complicity with our senses, and that is why it is so hard to get rid of it—it is like throwing and old friend out of the house." Temple's insistence on making domestic ware—work for other human beings to use and his struggle to inject into those objects a sense of mystery and life is, ultimately, what make his work so important. It comforts us and reminds us of what it means to be human.

Acknowledgements:
I want to thank Philip Barlow, Sarah Bodine, Larry Bosco, Warren Frederick, Sheila Hoffman, Katie Kazan, Mary Law, John Pfahl, Gill Stengil, Bill Van Gelder and Gerry Williams for all their contributions and encouragement.
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