Out of Round
A Brief Outline of the Studio Pottery Movement
* 1st at Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 2024 — https://www.trinitybuoywharf.com/news/trinity-buoy-wharf-drawing-prize-2024-winners-announced
Out of Round Index (2024)
3 mm Steel Wire
67 x 39 x 3 in.
The Studio Pottery Movement constitutes the emergence of fine art ambitions within the craft discipline of ceramics. In other words, it represents the potter’s struggle between artistic liberty and conformity to tradition. Out of Round, my MFA research project at the Royal College of Art, offers an appraisal and revision of this movement and its legacy.
This movement is best characterized in the diverging practices of William Staite Murray and Bernard Leach, both living and working around the turn of the 20th c. in modernized England. Murray pioneered a fine art approach, selling his expressive pots to collectors within London’s commercial gallery setting. Leach, on the other hand, sustained the classical craft model, training apprentices to produce standard wares at his studio in St. Ives. His noble craft was made accessible to all people for everyday use.
Today, Bernard Leach is recognized as the Father of the British Studio Movement. Murray’s efforts to raise pottery’s prestige produced a lineage of more experimental though less accessible offshoots—both in financial and aesthetic terms. By contrast, Leach’s traditional forms were widely admired, even perhaps bolstered by Murray’s fine art advocacy. With fame, however, his utilitarian pots have become too precious for use. The works of many Studio Potters have likewise become flattened by the collector market.
Out of Round constitutes a reversal of Murray’s efforts: applying a craft ethos to art rather than an art ethos to craft. This project distills the essence of Leach’s studio ceramics model within a fine art idiom. Abstraction and homage became the key methods of research. The series is composed of foreshortened wire-frame models. These studies are based on renowned studio potter’s works, building upon the silhouette. Although the project differs quite widely from its source material, the two are unified by a craft ethos. This ethos is recognized through one’s concern for volume, pacing, detail, consistency, emphasis on technique, adherence to the forms, and a sensitivity to material.
Out of Round provides an outline of the Studio Movement and the subsequent flattening of Studio Pottery into icons of regional identity, anti-industrial labour, and domesticity.
The forms represented by Out of Round Index are adapted from the works of British Studio Potters, as well as several outliers and influences upon the movement.
Top left to bottom right: Anonymous Chinese Ceramicist (Song Dynasty), Michael Cardew, Bernard Leach, Hans Coper, Norah Braden, Charles and Nell Vyse, Lucie Rie, Phil Rogers, Magdalene Odundo, Shoji Hamada, Ursula Mommens, and Edwin Beer Fishley.
Out of Round Index is shortlisted for the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize, held Oct. 2024.
Studio Pottery in North Carolina
British expat to the United States, Mark Hewitt, has carried the Studio Movement with him to American soil. His branch of the studio movement is informed by his training with Michael Cardew—Bernard Leach’s first apprentice. Since then, Hewitt has overseen the training of numerous apprentices as well as over 100 seasonal kiln openings at his studio, located in Pittsboro, North Carolina.
His students have likewise established studios of their own within the region, sustaining the apprenticeship model. This brief index, North Carolina Potters, traces a particular branch of the Hewitt family tree of pottery. It includes works adapted by Mark Hewitt, Matt Jones, and Daniel Johnston, as well as East Fork potters Alex Matisse, John Vigeland, and Cade Hollomon-Cook.
I trained under the East Fork potters’ guidance near Asheville, North Carolina, beginning in 2016. This series is an homage to regional history and tradition. It was an opportunity for reflection upon my craft inheritance and a chance to admire the work of my friends and creative role models.
Top left to bottom right: Alex Matisse, Mark Hewitt, John Vigeland, Matt Jones, Cade Hollomon-Cook, and Daniel Johnston
North Carolina Potters (2024)
3 mm Steel Wire
31 x 36 x 3 in.
Photos by Allison Gretchko, Yoichi Ishida, and Milena Orlandi Mendes