Edmund de Waal and Julian Stair 1 2 3 4 5 - PRINTER VERSION
>> JS: I have spent all my life living in cities except for a year when I lived in Cornwall, almost next door to the Leach pottery, and six months in the Shenandoah Valley. This tradition you're talking about is something I wrestled with for a long time. I was drawn to this rural tradition on the one hand because I was interested in the way pottery as a medium could be used to express certain ideas, but on the other hand I just wasn't interested in the ideas that this tradition was premised upon. The writer Eric Hobspan talks about the "the invention of tradition". I think studio ceramics per se is an intellectual invention from the early part of this century and the Leach tradition is just one of the traditions that exists within this larger invented tradition of studio pottery. Someone who was very important to me was as a model, though, was Lucie Rie because she not only epitomized an urban or metropolitan approach, but also the fact that pottery could contain modernist ideas. That it didn't necessarily have to be about a nostalgic, romantic view of the past.
RB: What are the issues craftspeople in Britain are wrestling with at the moment?
JS: Well with the pluralism of the '80s there was a rejection in ceramics of the studio pottery tradition whose time many felt was past. It was like what was said of painting in the '70s, that painting is dead. I remember a catalog of an exhibition of kinetic art at the Haywood that described painting as the primitive practice of daubing pigment on woven material. I think that same kind of feeling existed in ceramics in the '80s about the rural studio pottery tradition. I think that now though there is at the grassroots level a feeling among younger potters in their 20s that the past actually has something to offer us and that making pottery is a worthwhile pursuit. It may not necessarily be the Leach tradition, which for a long time seemed to be the only model for studio potters. I think now there is a movement towards drawing from the past, not in a blind way, but reinterpreting it as part of a loose—and I use the term 'loose' delicately—ceramic language.
EdW: I hope that is so. I think I feel considerably more depressed about the current ceramics scene. I see inadequate revivals of figuration. I see people jumping on the bandwagon on minimalism. I see the continuation of a very vapid kind of postmodernism. I also see a few particularly good people emerging out of absolutely nowhere. I don't think that there is something that I can absolutely put my finger on at the moment either positively or negatively. Except to say that I think that one of the things that really is central at the moment to the crafts is the stuff about writing and language.
RB: It seems to me that here in Britain, unlike in the United States, the crafts world is more intimate and defined, so that when someone writes something or does something it has an immediate impact. So I am curious, do you feel there is any sense of urgency in Britain at the moment about coming to grips with what crafts' role in the near future?
EdW: The thinking here is pretty muddled. My hope for the future is that ceramics and the other crafts will shape up really, in relation to architecture and design. The crafts have to realize that the whole lazy approach to how ceramics are used, displayed and revealed within our cultural spaces is an important issue that has to be addressed.
>>
© 1980 - 2025 Rob Barnard . All Rights Reserved. Site design: eismontdesign
>> JS: I have spent all my life living in cities except for a year when I lived in Cornwall, almost next door to the Leach pottery, and six months in the Shenandoah Valley. This tradition you're talking about is something I wrestled with for a long time. I was drawn to this rural tradition on the one hand because I was interested in the way pottery as a medium could be used to express certain ideas, but on the other hand I just wasn't interested in the ideas that this tradition was premised upon. The writer Eric Hobspan talks about the "the invention of tradition". I think studio ceramics per se is an intellectual invention from the early part of this century and the Leach tradition is just one of the traditions that exists within this larger invented tradition of studio pottery. Someone who was very important to me was as a model, though, was Lucie Rie because she not only epitomized an urban or metropolitan approach, but also the fact that pottery could contain modernist ideas. That it didn't necessarily have to be about a nostalgic, romantic view of the past.
RB: What are the issues craftspeople in Britain are wrestling with at the moment?
JS: Well with the pluralism of the '80s there was a rejection in ceramics of the studio pottery tradition whose time many felt was past. It was like what was said of painting in the '70s, that painting is dead. I remember a catalog of an exhibition of kinetic art at the Haywood that described painting as the primitive practice of daubing pigment on woven material. I think that same kind of feeling existed in ceramics in the '80s about the rural studio pottery tradition. I think that now though there is at the grassroots level a feeling among younger potters in their 20s that the past actually has something to offer us and that making pottery is a worthwhile pursuit. It may not necessarily be the Leach tradition, which for a long time seemed to be the only model for studio potters. I think now there is a movement towards drawing from the past, not in a blind way, but reinterpreting it as part of a loose—and I use the term 'loose' delicately—ceramic language.
EdW: I hope that is so. I think I feel considerably more depressed about the current ceramics scene. I see inadequate revivals of figuration. I see people jumping on the bandwagon on minimalism. I see the continuation of a very vapid kind of postmodernism. I also see a few particularly good people emerging out of absolutely nowhere. I don't think that there is something that I can absolutely put my finger on at the moment either positively or negatively. Except to say that I think that one of the things that really is central at the moment to the crafts is the stuff about writing and language.
RB: It seems to me that here in Britain, unlike in the United States, the crafts world is more intimate and defined, so that when someone writes something or does something it has an immediate impact. So I am curious, do you feel there is any sense of urgency in Britain at the moment about coming to grips with what crafts' role in the near future?
EdW: The thinking here is pretty muddled. My hope for the future is that ceramics and the other crafts will shape up really, in relation to architecture and design. The crafts have to realize that the whole lazy approach to how ceramics are used, displayed and revealed within our cultural spaces is an important issue that has to be addressed.
>>
© 1980 - 2025 Rob Barnard . All Rights Reserved. Site design: eismontdesign