I was taught pottery (the posh word is ceramics now) at school by Gordon Baldwin and over the years have seen his work in galleries, at The Ashmolean Museum and The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich.
Now, until 5th August, Erskine, Hall & Coe are showing some of Gordon’s work from the 1970s and 1980s at their gallery in Royal Arcade, off Old Bond Street .
Most of the twenty-five pieces are substantial and all are abstract forms. He uses glazes, slips and oxides to create naturalistic finishes. His style is very different from that of Sophie MacCarthy. She let me use her studio in the 1990s and gave me some lessons, as I had forgotten a lot since hanging out with Gordon in the Arts School. She has been a professional potter for more than thirty years and produces most of her work on a wheel. Like Gordon’s work, her technique is as good as can be. Her decorative technique is unusual and extremely difficult to carry out. She uses slips and wax and only a transparent glaze. The wax is used to repel the slip so that a pattern can be created.
Her work is beautiful, practical and affordable. A visit to her studio in The Chocolate Factory, N16, is fun and I never leave empty-handed.
The third of today’s potters is Patricia Low. I lived in the Potting Shed at her home and studio in Tidpit in Wiltshire about 15 years ago. Her style is a complete contrast to that of Gordon and Sophie. She coils large urn-like pots. “Throwing” is the jargon for making a pot on a wheel, “coiling” is making sausages of clay and by laying them one on top of the other building a pot. Incidentally, much of Gordon’s work involves “slabbing”; rolling a piece of clay flat, like making pastry, cutting it into shapes and sticking those shapes together using slurry.
Patricia’s pots stand perhaps three or four feet tall and she uses oxides to decorate them. Again this is a hard technique to master and the curvature of the pot adds to the difficulty. Her work can sometimes be seen at The Fine Art Society in Bond Street.
Three very different potters, all right at the top of their game. If it inspires you to get coiling, clay is pretty easy to shape and the novice can produce something that technically may be inferior but looks good enough to give the maker some satisfaction. I must find a studio I can use.
Love it, Christopher – especially as the second two of the potters you mention are ones whose work I love too …
look forward to more,
x Ariane
Ariane, I’m glad that you like Sophie’s work; more affordable and practical to own than Patricia’s or Gordon’s but all three set a high standard.
I too was lucky enough to seek sancuary in the “Drawing Schools” where Gordon Baldwin inspired me to try my hand at pottery. A great get-away from the rather restrictive public school atmosphere,particualrly as GB was wonderfully anti-establishment. GB is well represented at the V&A. One of Gordon Baldwin’s pots in the V&A Collections
I’m still potting in retirement at home and at the West Street Potters, Farnham.
William, thank you for the V&A link. Also for correcting me re the Drawing Schools. I think you were with me when I fired up a homemade kiln at home in Ireland? I’d taken a few short cuts in its construction, as a result it exploded in its first and last firing. If you missed the programme on Radio 4 last Saturday morning about potting try and get it in on catch-up.