Byron Temple: The Gift To Be Simple   1      2      3      4      -      PRINTER VERSION

Published in American Craft, 51(4), August/September 1991.

Byron Temple's work is self-effacing, spare, practical and somewhat aloof. It is, in other words, antithetical to the aesthetic values expressed in most American ceramic art today. These qualities have not only put Temple and his pottery outside the mainstream, but also have made him anathema to those who have been struggling to "elevate" craft by portraying it as a kind of painting or sculpture rather than as an art form in its own right. While others of his generation "outgrew" pottery and went on to make either "gallery" vessels or ceramic sculpture, Temple continued his investigations of form as a "production" potter. For 40 years he has pursued his own vision of the medium as an expressive art whose meaning, he feels, is only truly understood through the intimacy of use.

Temple grew up on a farm in Indiana where his first exposure to pottery was the crocks the family used to preserve food. It was an unexplainable fascination with these handmade crocks that led him to try coil building in his high school art classes and put him on the path he was ultimately to follow. He first learned to use the potter's wheel in 1951, at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. His ceramics teacher, Marvin Reichle, urged him to continue his studies at Alfred University, where mold-made pottery designed for industry was at the time seen as the direction for utilitarian ware in the future. Temple felt strongly that he wanted to make things by hand, however, and his encounter with Bernard Leach's A Potter's Book reinforced his view that such an undertaking would be not only plausible but meaningful as well.

His work was briefly interrupted by a stint in the U.S. Army as an M.P. stationed in England, but by the end of the 1950s Temple had gained what he felt was an adequate proficiency. He attempted to sell his pottery while supporting himself at various times as a waiter, elevator operator and technical assistant in the ceramics studio at the Art Institute of Chicago. And he had grown confident enough to write Leach asking for an apprenticeship. At Leach's invitation he traveled with a bag of pots to the University of Michigan, where the British potter was conducting a workshop. After being interviewed by Leach, he was told to come to St. Ives, the Leach pottery in Cornwall.

While Temple was in England, he read Rose Slivka's article "The New Ceramic Presence" [Craft Horizons, July/August 1961. Slivka attempted to provide a new critical construct for pottery based on Abstract Expressionist painting by suggesting that the "classical form" of pottery with its limitations of use should be discarded so that pottery could serve the "freer expressive interests of surface." The painter-potter, she wrote, "engages in a challenge of function as a formal and objective determinant; he subjects design to the plastic dynamics of interacting form and color and even avoids immediate functional associations...a value which can impede free sensory discovery of the object just as its limitations can impede his creative act. And so, the value of use becomes a secondary or even arbitrary attribute."

To Temple, Slivka was saying that unless he gave up usefulness—the very element that attracted him to pottery in the first place—his work would never be considered art. He was being forced to choose, he felt, between being an artist or a potter—that there somehow was a gulf between the two that could not be reconciled.
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