Director of the Crafts Study Centre, Professor Simon Olding

The Crafts Study Centre was delighted to be able to open, for a short while at least, with the celebratory exhibition ‘The Leach Pottery: 100 years on from St Ives’. The thesis of the exhibition is to tell a story of the foundation and the work coming out of this remarkable studio through archives and objects that have been collected during the last 20 years, since the Crafts Study Centre relocated to Farnham and began its partnership with the University for the Creative Arts.

One aspect of the exhibition has been the reconfiguration of the display of Bernard Leach’s ceramics that were presented by his third wife, Janet Leach, in a ‘museum’ like room on the pottery site. These were often gifts to Janet on her birthday or anniversaries, so they have a very personal provenance.

A second aspect has been the display of new archive materials never seen before in public. Bernard Leach worked with Alan Bell, on his autobiographical book ‘Beyond East and West’, and gave Alan an extraordinary group of drawings, etchings, memorabilia and three oil paintings; and these works are displayed for the first time.

Two very different exhibitions also consider the legacy of the Leach Pottery. Kai Althoff goes with Bernard Leach at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, (see review below) counterpoints the German painter’s work with Leach’s pots. More conventionally, our good friends at the Mashiko Museum of Ceramic Art in Japan have curated an exceptional exhibition of ceramics by Leach and Shoji Hamada and many potters from England, America and Japan who have been influenced by the Leach tradition.

The exhibition ‘Started it in England: Hamada and Leach, in Two Ways’, is a tour de force of exacting curatorship. It introduces the development of British studio pottery from around 1920 to the present and that of Mashiko's studio pottery starting from Hamada.

Exhibition poster for Started it in England: Hamada and Leach, in Two Ways at the Mashiko Museum of Ceramic Art, Japan — Exhibition poster for *Started it in England: Hamada and Leach, in Two Ways* at the Mashiko Museum of Ceramic Art, Japan

Hamada Shoji - Vase 1923 - School of Art Museum and Galleries, Aberystwyth University .jpg

Bernard Leach - Raku Plate 1919, Mashiko Museum of Ceramic Art c. The Bernard Leach Family, DACS & JASPAR 2020

As I write this blog, we are not quite half way into our second lockdown and once again closed to the public. Museums and galleries worldwide are facing restrictions brought about by the impact of Covid 19, and the normal transitions of an exhibition programme have been an inevitable casualty. This has been especially trying in relation to the events planned this year to celebrate the founding of the Leach Pottery in St Ives in 2020.

We have to find new ways of connecting the wonderful objects and archives that we help care for to our public and research audiences, and the short films and reviews are a way of staying connected as we are closed. Above all, we wish everyone at The Leach Pottery good heart as they find their way through the centenary year: may it continue well into 2021.

Kai Althoff Goes With Bernard Leach, Whitechapel Gallery, October 2020

7 October 2020 – 10 January 2021

In the normal way of things we’d expect to see Bernard Leach’s ceramics presented in public in the ‘holy quiet’ of a museum case: few accoutrements other than a museum label and a plinth. Each pot would be sure of its own identity, expressed through materials, date or provenance or its partnership with a companion work or grouping. The curator would have spoken.

In the top floor of the Whitechapel Gallery, Leach’s work takes on a new perspective and meaning.

The artist has spoken.

Kai Althoff goes with Bernard Leach, Whitechapel Gallery 2020 c.The Telegraph — *Kai Althoff goes with Bernard Leach*, Whitechapel Gallery 2020 c.The Telegraph

A long, narrow line of rectangular cases are dressed for the occasion in metal-sheeted-bases, rusty-brown-textured. Each case holds a few ceramic items: a tile and two small vases; a bowl inspired by Sawankhalok ceramics from Thailand and a necklace; the Crafts Study Centre’s own Leach charger made at Dartington, Devon and nine small buttons which almost disappear into the specially made fabric lengths by Althoff’s collaborator, the weaver Travis Josef Meinof.

The base of each case is dressed by woven fabric, with strips of warm colours from a shadowy pink to autumn-leaf gold, these colours harking to the palette of Leach’s pots, the tenmoku brown, the golden slip trail, the softest copper-green or the gentle white of his Ying Ching glaze.

We see first the length of the linear sequence of these cases, and may then deduce that the pots within them are not ordered by date of manufacture, but, rather, by their colour rhythms and the peaceful conjunction of hand-made cloth, clay and glaze. Leach has been ‘installed’ by the artist.

The pots stand up to this original treatment: soft yet pithy companions to the textile grounding and metal supports. The display reads like a quixotic retrospective of Leach’s individual ceramic work – from early 20th century raku ash jars made in Japan to confident pieces made in his maturity, like the fine quasi-medieval jug with a wood ash glaze.

The installation reveals the attraction that these pots of a lifetime’s work in the ceramic studio have for Kai Althoff, put together in harmony and tone rather than in a timeline.