A Resurgence of Studio Pottery: The Leach Pottery

In the years following the Second World War there was a resurgence of crafts in North America.

Potters’ wheels and kilns proliferated in community centres, schools, colleges and universities. In the largely conformist culture of the 1950s one can see why making a vessel by hand spoke of something anciently human and individual. In a world where plastic things were ascendant, pots were made of earth and fire. In the 1960s, studio pottery became part of the back-to-the-land culture and interwoven with the values of West Coast modern design and architecture.

One of the most consequential figures behind the increasing interest in ceramics was Bernard Leach.

Leach founded a teaching pottery in St. Ives, Cornwall, U.K. in the 1920s with famed Japanese potter Shoji Hamada. The Leach Pottery would become among the most respected and influential potteries in the world and forged the shape of Studio Pottery in the UK and beyond.

Scores of potters, students and apprentices, from across the world have come to the Leach Pottery to train, creating a uniquely international environment in the heart of Cornwall and maintaining the Pottery’s creative principle of East/West exchange.

Looking back to the Arts and Crafts movement founded by William Morris and the Mingei Japanese folk art revival of the 1920s, Leach aimed to rekindle the craft of studio pottery in the age of mass industrial production. He drew on Asian and European traditions hoping to create a pottery that blended East and West. For Leach, the handmade pot contained the spirit of its maker.

Apprentices at St. Ives were guided in contradictory but productive ways. On the one hand, they were trained to make the same functional forms again and again until they became so deft they produced them almost automatically. This skill was used to make Leach Pottery standard ware while it also valorized the idea of the unknown craftsman sinking their ego into their work. On the other hand, this rigorous training, which involved hand, eye, and a feeling for the great traditions of the past, produced a mastery of a skill set that, naturally enough, could be used to make masterworks.

The Leach Pottery’s influence was international, but nowhere was the influence so deep nor the banner carried by so many as in British Columbia.

Leach’s four Canadian apprentices all came from the Vancouver School of Art. Glenn Lewis, John Reeves, Michael Henry and Ian Steele apprenticed in the 1960s, and Martin Peters and Charmian Johnson spent significant time at the pottery in the 1970s.

When these potters returned to British Columbia, they taught, set the bar for skill, and established an attitude toward studio pottery that dominated the modern taste for studio pottery for decades.

For further information, read Leach’s A Potter’s Book, first published in 1945. Much more than about making pots, it is a treatise about how to live a life of resistance to an increasingly mechanized world.

–Scott Watson (Professor Emeritus, UBC Visual Arts and former Director of the Belkin Gallery)

About the Auction

Our Studio Pottery Auction presents a selection of studio pottery from across Canada. Notable pieces include works by Wayne Ngan and Charmian Johnson, as well as pieces by Walter Dexter, Robert Archambeau, and decorative works by Tommy Kakinuma and other important makers.

Click here to view or bid: Auction Gallery. Bid online October 31 – November 12.

All lots are located at our Vancouver gallery. Previews by appointment.

Please contact us for more information.