The Private Life of a Potter
…poet Thomas Hennell. In The Countryman at Work Hennell documented, with detailed drawings and text, the workshops of a wide range of traditional hand crafts …
Chapter Extract:
….of a wide range of traditional hand crafts:
The Windsor chair maker, basket weaver, ladder maker… fifteen in all; some, like the rope maker and scythe smith, probably the last generation to use such methods, others, like the thatcher, would continue to prosper. While all were unknown to me then, I discovered as an adult, that the potter was Michael Cardew; probably the only one with a classic’s degree from Oxford! As an undiagnosed dyslexic I had shunned the text but studied the drawings with close attention. I was fascinated by the tools, many of which were made by the craftsmen themselves, fashioned for a particular specialist job. Struggling to progress in an unsympathetic academic system I envied these men their self-sufficiency and the independence it represented. What I now realise is the way Hennell’s drawings communicated something more elusive, a way of life, a set of values and a deep knowledge of something important, an education but one that was not available in my schooling. Each drawing had a sense of quiet, steady industriousness. What Hennell captured was the distinctive space in which things are made. The dishevelled order that surrounds work in progress: the half made, the tools, ready for use, informally hung on workshop walls. Weedy courtyards of raw materials stacked waiting to be processed or apparently useless scrap, its true valued recognized and saved by the frugal craftsman in some quiet corner. Hennell’s visual notes describe stages of production revealing the subtilises in, what otherwise might seem, simple unsophisticated artifacts. Delicately Hennell’s visceral drawings revealed something of the character of maker, material and method. As I turned the book’s pages, I inhaled the freshly shaved wood of the cooper’s workshop and could feel, in my nostrils, the frosty rust on the pile of horseshoes stacked next to the smith’s hand cranked pillar drill. I recognised this world because as a young child I had first-hand experience of such men. Back then the village still had a carpenter. He would let me sit among the shavings and watch as, ironically, he made a coffin. I can still recall the measured pace of work, the regular sound of steel on oilstone and the crisp bight of his razor-sharp chisel cutting a dove tail in the seasoned oak before industrialization swept aside his business like a fallen leaf in a tsunami.
This book touches on the ontology of present-day craft pottery workshops. By referring Hennell’s descriptions of the work and workshops of craftsmen, who’s preindustrial methods survived into the 20th century, I am following a well-established pattern. Many books on contemporary crafts provide a historic context. An introduction that seeks legitimacy, authority, authenticity even, by drawing parallels between past and present practice. Often virtues, perceived to be associated with the former are ascribed to the latter because both appear to be using the same or similar methods. Modern practitioners who use hand tools, work alone or in a small team or who’s finished work resembles, in style or technique, makers from the past are presented as their descendants. A legitimate line of succession evidenced not just by what they make but how and where they make. But we should be cognisant of anthropologist Nigel Barley’s observation that hand crafted pots still produced by traditional methods in remote rural communities of sub-Saharan Africa bare no social/economic relationship to ones made in modern post-industrial societies. He describes the makers as contrasting examples: “The former, in her mode of production, acts as a realistic model for society as a whole. The latter -as a producer- is a sort of bizarre marginal being, located in the cultural reserve of art…”. (Continued)
