Art and Design At Alfred; Turners and Burners; The New Ceramics, Book Reviews  1      2      3      4      -      PRINTER VERSION

>> Art and Design at Alfred is nevertheless worth reading. If you are persistent, you can get a sense of how much academic institutions have shaped ceramic art in this country, a reality that we have come to take for granted. Perhaps it is time to explore the effects of this institutionalization of ceramic art and examine its faults as well as its contributions.

Turners and Burners, a complex and exhaustive study of North Carolina folk potters from the mid-1700s to the present, offers an interesting contrast to Art and Design at Alfred. Charles G. Zug III, an associate professor of folklore and English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, succeeds in one of the pivotal goals of his treatise: to provide "full consideration of the cultural context" of the potters he examines. Without cultural context, Zug rightly believes, it would be too easy to both romanticize and depreciate the achievements of these potters. His primary device is the interview with surviving potters and family members who recall the making and firing of pottery from their childhood. Their words are more than colorful anecdotes; they are the means by which Zug shows us the potter's life from the inside. He quotes Burlon Craig, one of the few remaining folk potters still at work, remembering his partnership with Vernon Leonard:

"He was paying me so much for every kiln we burnt and then paying me for turning and drying. He was getting the clay and wood and doing the burning." When Vernon died in 1946, two of his sons decided that "they wanted to try it a while, same arrangement. They'd go to sleep and let the fire go out of the kiln at night... The older boy went to sleep, and the younger one did too—he was supposed to have been firing. He let the fire go out, and he woke up before the older one did. And he didn't want him to know that the fire had been out, so he gets up, throws a heavy fire in there, and busted about two-thirds of the kiln. And I said 'Boys, I believe it would pay you to get into something else'."

Later, as Zug discusses the standards that folk potters applied to pottery, he gives us the reactions of some of the old timers to the thick-walled pottery from Georgia: "Hell, that ain't pottery! That ain't a damned thing but a ball of clay with a hole punched in it." It is passages like these that give the book texture and an unshakable authenticity.

Another satisfying aspect of Turners and Burners is the use of photographs to illustrate Zug's points. There is one of potters digging clay by a stream at the turn of the century, numerous plates of kilns and studios and an interesting one comparing the infamous Georgia churn to one of the same type made in North Carolina. The fact that most are reproduced on the pages where they are discussed is a bonus.

More than a valuable record of the history of folk potters in North Carolina, Turners and Burners is important documentation of a region rich in ceramic history that has been almost totally ignored by the academic institutions responsible for the education of the majority of the practicing potters in this country.

Many of the most well known of these institutionally trained potters are included in Peter Dormer's The New Ceramics. It might be more aptly named New Anglo-Saxon Ceramics, for Dormer does not deal
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