From Anglo-Oriental to Afro-Oriental Ronnie Watt, 2014-2015

(Draft text for a forthcoming book on South African studio and ceramics, to be published by the University of South Africa in 2015/2016.)

The English tradition that gained shape in the 1920s and would come to be known as Anglo-Oriental, laid the foundations for a specific approach to materials, processes, forms, ethics and aesthetics. Within three decades, the Anglo-Oriental way of thinking and making, launched a new generation of studio potters and spread as far afield as the U.S.A., and South Africa. In essence it was about the ‘thinking of making’. However, the standards of form and decoration set by the Anglo-Oriental pioneers became formulaic and pervaded the western world. The result was an ‘international pot’, motivated by a traditionalist philosophy that shunned modernism and capitalism, and in which for the most part individual expression became, wrote the Australian studio pottery art historian Damon Moon:1 “buried … in a calligraphic cipher of brown on black” so that “one couldn't tell whether a faceted celadon glazed jar was made in Melbourne or ”.

By the 1950s, just as the pioneer South African studio potters started to establish their fledgling studios, the Anglo-Oriental tradition was already standing in contrast to the emerging modernist art movement in which clay artists shifted their attention from the pot to the vessel and, according to the ceramics writer Karen Weiss,2 a focus on “authorship, tactility, sensuality, original form and direct manipulation”. Then, as now, Anglo-Oriental studio pottery became tarred with an epithet that does it no justice, blandly dismissed as pottery that became trapped in stereotypical, high-temperature, reduction-fired stoneware with dark-coloured or neutral glazes and subtle brushwork decoration.3 The Anglo-Oriental school of thought shaped by (1887-1979) and (1894-1979), has been relegated to the realm of a romanticised craft. Their devout followers, wrote the American studio potter and teacher John Britt,4 are “Neo-Leachians [who] can be heard chanting, generally in a high pitched, whinny squeal, ‘beauty, form, and function...’ over and over”.

The South African ceramist and art historian Ian Calder5 got it right when he lamented that the Anglo-Oriental studio pottery tradition has been wronged by presenting it as “a single monolithic tradition” espoused by Leach. We can only come to understand the Anglo- Oriental studio pottery philosophy and its expression, and how it contributed to early South African studio pottery, when it is considered in context of the evolution of 20th century studio pottery and specifically in , continental Europe, the Far East and the U.S.A.

In the latter part of the 19th century by which time the industrial revolution had mechanised production and restructured economies and societies, there came to be a longing for a return to the aesthetics of the hand-made artefact. The architect of the Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain was William Morris (1834-96) who took inspiration from the call by John Ruskin (1819-1900) to preserve individual craftsmanship and challenge the uniformity and anonymity of mass-made machine goods. The Arts and Crafts Movement which flourished into the first decade of the 20th century, promoted the “humble anonymous craftsmen producing simple, useful articles for everyday use”6 in which craft was not a skill but a defined area or type of work, that conferred dignity on the crafters, and directly linked the crafter to the craft output, from all of which the crafter could gain a ‘spiritual satisfaction’.7

Parallel to the work produced in functional ware , an industry that focussed on producing ‘art pottery’ came into being. Pottery manufacturers established special art departments or studios within their operations and employed designers, modellers and painters to create ‘art wares’.8 To some degree this satisfied the demand for the ‘hand- made’ decorative artifact but it still deprived the worker of individual recognition and reward. It was only after World War 1 in a ravaged and redefined society, that the middle- class artist and crafter emerged with a vision of being both designer and maker in whose work art and craft would be unified, or as the studio pottery historian Oliver Watson puts it: “The actual touch of the artist's hand on the material [became] an important part of the artistic expression and an important mark for the owner in pointing to the object's uniqueness and worth.”9

In the mid-1920s, the term ‘studio pottery’ described hand-made pottery produced individually on a small scale by a single person or a small studio team whether for the express purpose of function or as aesthetic statement.10,11 The two leading figures in Britain at that time, were Leach and William Staite Murray (1881-1962). Both gained benefit from European interest in the aesthetics of ceramics dating to the Tang and Song dynasties (7th to 13th century) which were discovered during the cutting of lines in 1899 for a new railway through China’s Henan Province. The tombs that were unearthed during the construction produced a very different type of ceramics compared with the known underglaze-blue, polychrome and sang de boeuf glazed Ming and Qing dynasty (13th to 17th century) wares. These stoneware works with their demure, harmonious shapes and monochrome glazes12,13 in particular, drew attention and admiration. When such Oriental aesthetics were echoed in European pottery, galleries became keen to exhibit and sell the one-off works by artist potters. This opened the door for Staite Murray, who was Head of Pottery at the Royal College of Art from 1925 to 1939, to present his work as finely proportioned and decorated pots in an art form in its own right.14

Leach, on the other hand, aspired to fuse Eastern aesthetics of form and decoration with English practicality15 or at least, as described by the British studio pottery art historian Jeffrey Jones16 hold “the exotic Eastern and the indigenous English … in a creative tension which gave opportunities for a playful crossover of techniques, styles and sensibilities”. This was the basic tenet of Leach’s philosophy that shaped Anglo-Oriental studio pottery.

What Leach absorbed during his stay in from 1910 to 1920, was an appreciation for Japanese concepts of art and beauty and at other times during his extensive travels in the Far East, a fascination with Song dynasty and Korean pottery. He studied traditional Japanese pottery under Urano Shigekichi (1851-1923), the Sixth Kenzan (Kenzan can be roughly translated as being an individual, visionary master potter) and claimed to have jointly inherited the title of Seventh Kenzan along with his friend Tomimoto Kenkichi (1886-1963). Such a title would have elevated Leach to the status of a Japanese master potter whereas the fact is that the volume of glaze recipes which his Kenzan teacher handed him must be interpreted as a certificate of competence rather than an acknowledgement of succession.17 On his return to England and with the help of his potter- friend Shōji Hamada (1894-1979), Leach established a workshop at St. Ives, Cornwall where during the initial years of production, he specialised in creating a range of domestic slip-decorated earthenware and alongside those, pieces inspired by medieval period Chinese stoneware.18 Leach’s early studio pottery at St. Ives is of particular relevance not because of the studio’s output but because of his philosophy that was taking shape: the artist was the craftsman, all the processes from concept to completion were of equal importance, and the production of standard wares did not exclude the studio potter from creating individual pieces.19

A second significant influence on Leach was the rise in the 1920s of the Japanese folk craft movement known as mingei, defined by Yanagi20 as “the crafts or arts made by the people to be used daily by the people … to imply the opposite of bourgeois fine art”. Leach, Hamada and Kawai Kanjiro (1890-1966) contributed to the ideas of the Japanese folk craft collector Sōetsu Yanagi (1889-1961) that anonymous, humble, selfless, and ego- less utilitarian folk craft embodied true beauty.21 Mingei, explains Watson, blended the Arts and Crafts movement’s concern with the spiritual degradation of industrialised life with oriental religious beliefs,22 culminating in an ‘ethical’ pot. For the social anthropologist Brian Moeran, in the analysis of the Japanese art specialist Ellen P. Conant,23 it was an “amalgam of philosophical, religious and aesthetic elements that saw beauty in utilitarian objects made by and for common people”. As its appeal and influence grew in the West, wrote the American studio potter Mark Hewitt24 mingei came to represent a movement that was “anti-industrial and anti-capitalist … [appealing] to the independent-minded who seek a semblance of autonomy or isolation, a desire to go it alone and ‘get off the grid’.

In practise the mingei-suffused Anglo-Oriental studio pottery method evolved around the involvement and control by the potter in every stage of production. The potter conceptualised the work, dug the clay, formed and glazed and decorated the shapes, and sold them mostly direct to buyers. The ideal form of a utilitarian work was achieved by repetition but even so the works invited the potter’s textural signature in finger prints, throwing lines, interventions, and imperfections. The studio pottery historian Candice Vurovecz25 described this as: “The actual touch of the artist's hand on a vessel held immense importance and value as part of artistic skill and expression. This amplified an object's uniqueness and worth”.

The Leachian way of thinking about and making pottery was transmitted in his first book, A Potter's Book published in 1940. In essence it proposed that a potter and his assistants could produce a range of utilitarian wares and individual works in a studio as a feasible enterprise. Proof of that was already delivered by Leach’s first student, (1901-1983) who set up a studio in Winchcombe, Gloucestershire in 1926 to produce a range of ‘homely’26 wares that would appeal to a contemporary market.

Parallel with the development of the English studio pottery, the Bauhaus movement (1919- 1933) in Germany explored functional design and new ways of processing materials. It also prepared the way for potters to design mass-produced wares often in studios within factories such as Arabia in Finland and Gustavesberg in Sweden. In the years after World War II, the teaching of craft pottery flourished in art schools and colleges with some institutions leaning towards the 'orientalist’ ethical school of Leach and others favouring the ‘modernism' of which the British studio potters (1902-1995) and Hans Coper (1920-1981) were the leading proponents. Rie’s work focussed on subtle, industrial shapes and Coper developed the form of the pot into a sculptural work. The stage for their work was set by Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) who started in 1946 to create pottery in a hitherto unknown idiom at Vallauris, France. His exhibition of ceramics in 1950 in London delivered proof that a craft could be blended with art in a thoroughly modern style.27 The Leachian principles, blended with modernist influences, contributed to the rise to the Scandinavian Modernism movement that addressed, in the description of David Ryan28 of The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the “ethics and aesthetics of humanism, tradition, moderation, hand-crafted perfectionism, modesty, quietude and purposefulness” in unpretentious, man-made forms. In the 1960s the British art schools and colleges and in particular the Central School of Art and Design, in London, shifted their focus from teaching pottery as craft practise to that of encouraging individual creativity in the “investigation of form, material and captured movement”.29 The age of the vessel in which the pot was no longer an object but became a subject, had dawned.

The new movement did not sound the death knell for utilitarian studio pottery, which by then had a firm foundation in throwing as a technique and stoneware as medium30 laid by Leach, Hamada, Cardew (at his original Winchcombe and later Wenford Bridge in Cornwall studios, and also in Abuja, Nigeria) and a succession of their students and followers, prominent amongst whom were Raymond Finch (1914–2012) at Winchcombe, Kenneth Quick (1931–1963) at the Tregenna Hill Pottery in Cornwall, Warren MacKenzie (1924-) in the U.S.A., Harold Hughan (1893-1987) in Australia, and Peter Stichbury (1924-) in New Zealand. The South Africans who benefitted from direct associations with either Cardew, Finch or Quick were Esias Bosch (1923-2010), Hyme Rabinowitz (1920- 2009) and Bryan Haden (1930-).

At the International Conference of Craftsmen in Pottery and Textiles, held in 1952 at Dartington Hall in Totnes, Devon, England, there came about a subtle but significant shift away from studio pottery as craft towards studio pottery as art, in the sense that “the crafts person's products [should] command a market as works of art”.31 Two of the conference themes addressed critical contemporary debate: the craftsman's function in an industrialized society, and the craftsman of today as an inheritor of traditions from every culture and age, and the influence of these traditions on his development and outlook.32 Leach, Hamada, Yanagi and Cardew were in attendance. Leach was already critical of the standard of studio pottery in the post-World War II years and thought that the craft was “suffering from aesthetic indigestion”.33 Directly after the conference, Leach, Hamada and Yanagi visited the U.S.A. on an extended tour where Leach argued that the American artist-potter was over-intellectualized and failed in his efforts to integrate elements of the world's best traditions into an evolved American tradition.34 For Leach,35 the blending of the pottery traditions of the East and the West was “… a question of marriage, not prostitution. ... Can the free-form geometry of the post-industrial era assimilate with organic humanism of the pre-industrial?” On the one hand, Leach was, said his wife Janet (1918 - 1997) in a conversation with the studio potter and art historian Gary Hatcher,36 “the great granddaddy of the ‘do your own thing' generation’”. On the other, in the evaluation of Hatcher,37 he was “focused on the past … [looking] over his shoulder, romanticizing earlier times” and “mingei was the embodiment of the romantic return to the past”. Leach himself most certainly did not stick rigidly to the precepts of mingei of creating nameless, generally affordable, commonplace, utilitarian wares. He also produced works for galleries which sold at three times the price of his regular output, well above the means of the average British skilled worker38 and added his ‘BL’ potter’s mark to his work.

Anglo-Oriental, as an all-encompassing label for all that Leach promoted and which was suffused with a hefty dose of mingei idealism, never achieved nor aspired to achieve a set formula for process, form, or decoration. Instead, said Cardew,39 what it did awaken in the studio potter, irrespective of culture, tradition and reference world, were spiritual standards. That ‘spirit of the pot’ is best illustrated in an interview with Leach conducted by Dean Schwarz40 in 1978 when Leach was already a frail man: Leach: “Well, in my lifetime I've only made two pots that the inside was the outside.” Dean: (astonished) “What?” Leach: “I've only made two pots that the inside was bigger than the outside. Well, you can't see what's inside, but you can see the pot. You know how big or small the pot is or that texture it has. But the hole!? It's marvellous how subjective art is. With some tea bowls the inside seems bigger than the outside. That's what's good about them. With humans it's what's here (points to his heart) that makes the difference. If you don't have it in the heart, nothing you make will make any difference … The trouble with so much art - it has too much ‘I’ in it. The trick is to get the ‘I’ out, to let God in.” No South African studio potter was ever apprenticed to Leach or Hamada and their exposure to Anglo-Oriental theory and practise came second-hand in particular via Finch and Cardew. Cardew was never cast in a strict Leachian mould and unlike Leach, wrote the studio pottery and ceramics historian and critic Garth Clark, he “was the real thing when it comes to serving utility”.41 Much more so than in Leach’s, Cardew’s utilitarian wares were earthy and vigorous, “… [produced by] robust handling of the clay … [and] direct and lively decorative processes” as described by Jones.42 He had no aspirations to make ‘art pottery’ but wanted to make ‘nice’ pots to be used, or as Cardew43 explained: “By ‘nice,’ I mean convenient, well designed, good to look at and to handle and to live with, not too much more expensive than those produced by the ‘factory system,’ and above all, alive…”

By therefore branding the first group of South African studio pottery figures – Bosch, Rabinowitz and Haden – and the next generation of this country’s studio potters as ‘Anglo- Orientalist’, it is wrongly presumed that they were the disciples of Leach and Hamada. Admittedly those studio potters did not contest their Anglo-Oriental label perhaps because they had no other term of reference for what they stood for and for what their style represented other than being utilitarian, or because they felt comfortable within a broad interpretation of Anglo-Oriental studio pottery which had by then become a multi-cultural hybrid. Reflecting on this, the studio potter David Walters44 explained that: “… people like [Tim] Morris, Rabinowitz, Bosch - even me, to an extent - received the Anglo Oriental 'feel' second hand, so to speak. The traditions brought to the pottery world by Leach et al, had already become a part of the 'language' of clay by the time we came along. I am not sure how conscious we were of that influence - we were thoroughly aware of it, of course, but I don’t picture myself in a bamboo grove on ‘Mount Fujiyama’”.

In 1974 in his introductory chapter in the seminal book Potters of Southern Africa, Clark did not implicitly identify the studio potters of the decades of the 1950s and 1960s as Anglo-Orientalists but in reading his definition of their work, the influence of the Anglo- Oriental aesthetics and ethics emerged quite distinctly: “Their artistic expression is introspective, with the self sublimated in favour of impersonal perfection. The traditionalist as often as not binds his craft and life philosophy into a single purist entity, seeking seclusion rather than further stimuli, concentrating on the repetitive, perfecting a technique, a shape, a decoration, a glaze.”45

The appeal of the thought and form of such studio pottery, says the studio potter Steve Shapiro46, lay in recalling ‘a time of textured sanity’: “There is something so intrinsically valuable in the quiet value system of functional (Anglo-Oriental in particular) craft pottery. I think the attraction may have had something to do with the relief that came from demoting the ego without expelling it; a discovery of that much clichéd and jeered at ineffable and intellectually inexpressible sense of respectful meaning which is so wanting in our declining aesthetic culture. Consumerism, fashion and the excesses of rationality have created a puffed-up and empty zeitgeist, the high points of which seem to be cynicism, superficiality and a pointlessness borne of literal dogma and doctrine: in short, a lack of imagination, an absence of metaphor.”

Craft pottery as a casual hobbyist pursuit, flourished alongside studio pottery throughout the 1970s and into the early 1980s and produced, wrote the ceramist and art historian Wilma Cruise:47 “… a mixture of art and craft idealism… in the hands of myriad enthusiastic followers who adopted the outward form of the language with little of its underpinning idealism, Anglo-Orientalism soon degenerated into a hollow copy of itself.”

It was as though there was no understanding of the ‘how and why’ of studio pottery but emphasis only on the ‘what’ thereof, said the studio potter David Schlapobersky.48 This studio pottery output was met with derision by Malcolm P. MacIntyre-Read49 of the University of Natal’s Art Department in his article “Colour me clay – please” in which, with scathing satire, he referred to: “… Hairy Brown Stoneware and his mate Happy Accident… [emerging from the kiln] to choruses of eulogist falsetto gasps at the wonder of it all.”

In the early1990s, with in ascent, Cruise50 cautioned against: “… a tendency to forget ‘the bloody horse’. There is so much polishing of the saddle and dressing the bridle that the gutsy, breathing, living, animal is forgotten. Technique becomes subordinate to the real thing. Instead of being in service to a visually exciting object it becomes and end in itself – the horse is forgotten or at least neglected.” The warning went largely unheeded and in 2009, Cruise51 voiced her criticism of the post- modernist ceramic movement for having reached a stasis and that in retrospect the ‘Anglo- Orientalist baby’ was thrown out with the bath water: “In disregarding the stringent formalist precepts of Anglo-Orientalism we came to neglect form itself … and that [Anglo-Orientalism] belongs in its time and place, but it does hold object lessons for contemporary ceramists to revisit the formal properties of their work.”

To define the state and character of South African studio pottery as it was by the mid- 1980s and measure it against the classic Anglo-Oriental philosophy and method, we have to consider the foundation laid by Bosch, Rabinowitz and Haden, and a generation of studio potters following in their footsteps, prominent amongst whom were Andrew Walford (1942-), Bruce Walford (1951-), Tim Morris (1941-1990), Ian Glenny (1952-), Chris Patton (1939-), Digby Hoets (1949-), Elza Sullivan (1953-), Chris Green (1953-), David Walters (1950-), Neville Burde (1950-), Steve Shapiro (1945-), Rosten Chorn (1954–2005), John Wilhelm (1947-), Lindsay Scott (1947-), David Schlapobersky (1953-) and his partner Felicity Potter (1935-), and others.

The oeuvres of the early studio potters were shaped by their personal circumstances, contact with other studio potters both within and outside of South Africa, consumer preferences, perceptions and appreciation of craft, the availability of materials and technology, formal and informal training, and their social environments. None of the early studio potters produced formal writings about themselves and their works and much of what we know about them, must be gleaned from articles and casual references in the Sgraffiti magazine produced by the Association of Potters of Southern Africa (1973-1987), its successor National Ceramics Quarterly under the auspices of the Association which later adopted the name Ceramics Southern Africa. Ceramix and Craft South Africa Quarterly was published by the Southern Transvaal chapter of the Association from 1988 to 1991, and the Lantern and the SA Panorama magazines which had a special focus on South African culture and technology, gave the studio potters some exposure. The art reviews in newspapers such as The Star and Pretoria News regularly featured exhibition announcements and critiques. F.G.E. Nilant reviewed the status of mostly commercial pottery enterprises and pottery studios in his Contemporary Pottery in South Africa. (1963, Cape Town: A.A. Balkema). Garth Clark’s Potters of Southern Africa published in 1974 (Cape Town & Johannesburg: Struik) was the seminal reference work of its time on a select group of studio potters and pottery studios. Synoptic notes on the broader community of the studio potters can be gleaned from Maarten Zaalberg’s The 1985 Yearbook of South African Ceramics (Cape Town and Johannesburg: Perskor). Wilma Cruise’s 1991 book Contemporary Ceramics in South Africa (Cape Town: Struik Winchester) was the first full-colour book to feature a broad spectrum of studio potters and ceramists. The only two books dedicated to individual potters are Andrée Bosch and Johann de Waal’s Esias Bosch (1988, Cape Town: Struik Winchester) and Neil Wright’s A potter's tale in Africa: the life and works of Andrew Walford (2009, Kloof: Wright Publishing). At an academic level, the master’s dissertations of Candice Vurovecz, Hilda Ditchburn: A Teacher and Pioneer of Stoneware Ceramics in Southern Africa (2008, Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal) and Lara du Plessis’ Marietjie van der Merwe: Ceramics 1960-1988 (2007, Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal) provide valuable references to early studio pottery practise and teaching.

For the most part, the histories of the South African studio potters depend on reconstructing their lives and work from fragmented and incomplete documentation, and the analysis and critique of their works in private and public collections. Incomplete and subjective as these may be, their biographies and their works in contexts of their times are critical to come to an understanding of the evolution and expression of earlier South African studio pottery. Specific attention must be paid to Bosch, Haden, Rabinowitz, Morris, Andrew Walford, Glenny, and the partnership of Schlapobersky and Potter.

It was the distilling, inter-play and morphing of inner conviction and external influence which gave rise to Bosch’s distinct signature in his studio pottery. Interviewed by the journalist Madelein van Biljon,52 Bosch defined himself in his home language Afrikaans as ambagspotter and kunstenaar-ambagsman-pottebakker. It is important to understand his emphasis on “ambag” (trade) which he directly links with “kunstenaar” (artist) and potter and pottebakker (both meaning potter) because ambag as the root word of ambagsman and ambagspotter is the very essence of his aesthetics as potter and of his pottery. The noun ambag refers to manual labour, the descriptive noun ambagsman to having a career typified by manual labour but not manual labourer as a distinction of class in labour, and it also equates with (handi)craft, artisan and craftsman.53,54 Hence, ‘career potter’ could serve as translation for ambagspotter and ‘professional artist potter’ for kunstenaar-ambagsman- pottebakker. In expressing a self-description, Bosch is simultaneously a potter and artist, equipped with professional skills and manual dexterity, totally dedicated to the labour of ‘artful’pottery and in humble service thereof. This same consummate approach to his work, was also mirrored in his lifestyle of which he explained in a television documentary produced by Annie Basson55 and broadcast in 1976, that: “It is not just a matter of making a living, it is also a matter of how you live your life.”

To please his parents, he enrolled for his degree in dentistry at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg but within a week of attending classes, switched to a degree in the fine arts. After a year at the university, he enrolled at the Johannesburg Art School which placed greater emphasis on art as practice. He graduated in 1946 and accepted a teaching post at the Diskobolos School for disabled children. His then girlfriend and future wife, Valerie, spotted a newspaper advertisement inviting applications for the Robert Storm Ceramics Bursary at the Central School of Art and Design in London. Bosch applied principally to escape the humdrum and bureaucracy of his teaching post. He was awarded the bursary and departed for London at the end of 1949 to commence study under Dora Billington (1890–1968) in the ceramics department at the Central School of Art and Design. The course in pottery was geared towards training students as school craft teachers and this held no appeal for Bosch. This disillusion with formal training in art continued for many years afterwards and he was quite outspoken in his opposition to an academic grounding in art.

When Bosch expressed his wish to be a potter to Billington, she referred him to Raymond Finch at the Winchcombe Pottery. Bosch was accepted as apprentice and during the initial period had to perform the most menial of tasks with no pay. Then followed a period of six months during which he was permitted to throw only pint jugs on a kick-wheel. Finch did involve Bosch in the making of the pottery’s first stoneware pots which, recalled Bosch, had “the most wonderful tomato red” but, because of the high silica content, many of those shattered. About the Winchcombe experience he wrote much later that it taught him “the no nonsense approach to work”.56 To gain further experience, Bosch moved on to Cardew’s pottery at Wenford Bridge where he gained valuable experience in wood-firing. In this time he met Leach and Hamada.

He returned to South Africa in September 1952 and with some months to spare before taking up the post of head of the ceramics department at the Technical College in Durban, he found employment at the Globe Potteries in Pretoria where his job was to decorate earthenware ashtrays, vases and ornaments with San designs. His original bursary required of Bosch to serve a two year period at the Technical College but in his free time in a backyard studio, he produced his own slip-glazed domestic earthenware on a Leach kick- wheel, fired in an electric kiln. The Durban public showed little enthusiasm for Bosch’s pieces not because of their quality, but because of unfamiliarity with hand-thrown domestic ware and the notion of the time that only imported English pottery would be of any good. His next appointment was as part-time lecturer in ceramics at the Pretoria Art School which permitted Bosch to continue with his earthenware production in a studio in the city suburb of Hatfield. The range of pieces now also included vases, fruit bowls and tile panels.

A defining moment in his pottery career was the time spent with Cardew project at the Pottery Training Centre in Abuja, Nigeria in 1959 where Bosch learned from Cardew about stoneware clay, glazes and wood-fired kilns. Prior to his work in Abuja, Cardew produced inexpensive, utilitarian, wood-fired earthenware pots decorated with combed or trailed slip, or sgraffito designs. In Nigeria, Cardew switched from earthenware to stoneware and an African influence was revealed in his forms and decorative work. He returned to England with an ‘expanded studio pottery vocabulary’ which was both ‘Anglo- ethnic’ and Anglo-Oriental in character.57

The desire to have his own wood-fired kiln was one of the reasons that prompted Bosch to leave Pretoria and find a rural setting for a new home and studio. At Die Randjie (“The Hilltop”) outside the town of White River, he set up home and studio. Bosch had switched from earthenware to stoneware and would favour that clay medium until 1975 when he focused all his attention on porcelain. By October 1961, Bosch had mastered his materials, technique and firing and at the end of that year, he was able to supply stock to the gallery dealer Helen de Leeuw. De Leeuw58 later confirmed that Bosch in this period, had a primary interest in producing domestic ware “…believing that a potter performs his true function when his pots are put to daily use by the society around him.” She was also witness to his extreme proficiency in throwing and watched him as he threw thirty casseroles within as many minutes.

There is no record of Bosch participating in the functional-domestic-useful-utilitarian label debate. Interviewed by the journalist Petra Grutter,59 he dismissed all of that with his statement: “‘n Pot moet gesien word vir wat hy is” translated as “A pot must be appraised for what it is”. In another interview, this time with ? ,60 he did however, make a clear distinction between pots that are functional and pots for the voorkamer (living room), the latter specifically intended as “something to appease the soul” but nevertheless retaining the essence of functionality even if that would make it “a pretty pricy stewpot.” Bosch would have been in full agreement with Cardew that: “Usefulness did not preclude the possibility that an object might be a work of art”61 and in that sense, even something as ordinary as a sugar bowl earned the right to be displayed on a shelf all by itself because of its design for the specific purpose of functionality.

Bosch`s range of materials for his stoneware glazes were wood ash, dolomite, iron oxide, granite and also salt. He ground his own materials which were collected in the vicinity of his studio and believed that natural materials when fired at high temperature, gave his work a subtle character and greater variety.62 He considered his glazes to be his personal signature, wrote De Leeuw.63 When he abandoned stoneware for porcelain in 1975, it was partly because the glazes had lost their charm and grew to be “nice” and an easy way out to hide the sins of the pot64 and permitted slimmighede (‘clever niceties’).65

In all his years of pottery, Bosch only used a potter’s mark whilst working at Winchcombe where his initials were stamped alongside the studio’s “WP” mark66 and while teaching and working in Durban from 1952 to 1954 his mark was an aloe. In a published interview in 1979 he held the view that it is of no relevance which potter created which pot because the pot per se was what mattered. It was not said as a reference to the mingei tradition of anonymity for the sake of celebrating the pot and not the potter but out of exasperation with “the sick tendency of South Africans to chase after [famous] names, buying the name rather than the pot” which he denounced in an interview with the author Chris Barnard67 as self-aggrandizement.

Bosch regularly exhibited his functional and decorative pieces in South Africa and was represented in exhibitions in the U.S.A., Britain, Italy, Germany, Belgium and Switzerland. The University of Pretoria and the University of Stellenbosch awarded him their Chancellor Medals in 1990 and 1991 respectively and earlier, in 1981, he was honoured with the Medal of Honour by the South African Academy for Science and Art. Rather belatedly, the Association of Potters of South Africa of which Bosch was a pioneer member, only conferred the honorific title of “Master Potter” on Bosch in 2000.

Having gained intimate knowledge of his material, having honed his technique and mastered the studio processes, Bosch could deconstruct the pot to its parts, find its ineffable essence and then intuitively create form afresh, giving those forms new voices rather than recreate forms and make them speak in a contrived patois. He could then have lapsed into successive reincarnations of the same form but opted to make the point of arrival, the next point of departure.

Three of the early commentators on Bosch’s work emphasised the sophistication of his very basic approach to design. Clark hailed the purism, economy and technical perfection of his work.68 For the art historian F.G.E. Nilant69 the appeal of Bosch lay in the simplicity of materials and shape, and another art historian, Hans Fransen,70 praised the fine balance of shape and decorative elements. Bosch, wrote Nilant, sought to create an undeniably “South African product”.71

“If you can’t use a pot, it isn’t a pot,” says Bryan Haden.72 Haden was the son of Ruth Everard Haden (1904-1992), one of the group of five exceptionally talented women painters in the Everard family. Bryan too excelled at painting but after his school years in Swaziland when he enrolled for a degree in art at the University of Natal, he opted to focus on pottery and studied under Hilda Ditchburn (1917-1986).

Ditchburn started her own studies in pottery at the Central School of Arts and Crafts under Billington in 1947 and in turn taught pottery for 40 years at the University of Natal. She paid a special interest to the technicalities of producing pottery, experimented with different clays and glaze components,73 and designed and built the first studio pottery stoneware kiln in South Africa. Her pottery resolved in unique, individual pieces where form, decoration, and glazing affected one another.74

On completion of his degree, Haden set off to England in 1953 to visit potteries and on his return established a studio at Hay Paddock in Pietermaritzburg to produce functional pieces in oxidised stoneware. His early work was sufficiently impressive to earn him participation in a South African Craft Exhibition in Washington, U.S.A. but financial constraints compelled Bryan to close the studio in 1958. Haden established his second studio on the family farm Bonnefoi in 1963 but one year later he set off to work in stoneware at Aylesford Monastery Pottery in Kent. The monastery pottery was established by Leach and Colin Pearson (1923-????). Haden’s work was to throw Elizabethan-type ware including goblets, loving cups, cherubim pots and large holders for Holy Water. In 1965, he returned to South Africa to take up a teaching post at the Greenpoint Art Centre in Cape Town and in the following year he set up house and studio on the mountain slopes of Gordon’s Bay. Haden identifies Leach and Cardew as having significantly influenced his own approach to pottery but the English potter he most admired was (1910-1986) of Crowan Pottery, in Cornwall with whom he worked for two months during 1953. He was asked to sign up with Davis for a five year period but declined the opportunity, a decision which Bryan later deeply regretted. The fine appearance and strength of Davis’ pots were legendary. Davis, says Haden, could consistently throw better than Leach.75

He cemented a long-standing friendship with Rabinowitz who was then established at his Eagles Nest studio in nearby Constantia in Cape Town. His contact with the other prominent South African studio potters of that time was limited. He did visit Bosch at his White River studio and attended a workshop by Morris. The unmistakable identity of Bryan’s pots was by then firmly established. His output in the early years of the Gordon’s Bay studio was prolific. Clark76 described his oeuvre as deliberately limited to pots that were usable in simple, traditional shapes or as Haden put it to him: “… pots are primarily containers; they should… advertise their functions”.

The group of young studio potters who benefitted from contact with Haden include Rosten Chorn (1954–2005) who had his studio in the nearby Sir Lowry’s Pass Village, Yogi de Beer (1965-) with a studio in Mowbray in Cape Town, and Haden’s apprentices John Wilhelm, Dave Wells (1960- ) and Rudi Botha (1953-) who all later established their own successful studio potteries.

Haden simply does not intellectualise about his work and says in an off-handed manner that: “All I wanted to do was to make pots.”77 His decorative elements were always understated with particular emphasis on glazes “that would be thick and alive ... high-fired with lots of flame and flashing.”78 Decorations were done by brush or combed and scraped. The inspiration for decorative work were landscapes and especially those of the mountainous region of Bonnefoi which he would sgraffito into slip-covered pots. His works also featured simple geometric designs and simplified illustrations of veld flora including weeds found in the vlei.

Haden would never, according to Wilhelm,79 “put himself out to sell work”. What he sold was direct to the local public and at small galleries in Cape Town and Stellenbosch, and also via the craft promoter Helen de Leeuw at her Johannesburg gallery. There was no formal display and sales area in the Gordon’s Bay studio but pots were stacked in a small wooden shed and not always with price labels on them. It was as though, recalls Wells,80 there was no urgency to sell work. It would frequently happen that no one was in attendance at the studio and when buyers arrived, they would make their selection and leave payment in or under one of the pots or nothing more than a ‘thank you for the pot’ note. Wilhelm recalls a customer who came back to the studio after having bought a teapot which did not pour. It transpired that Bryan had forgotten to drill the hole from the pot into the spout and his laconic reply to the buyer was “Well, you should make the tea thinner”.81

It was quite by chance, said Hyme Rabinowitz, that he took up studio pottery. He was a 33 years old qualified accountant, disillusioned with his career, who in 1953 started to attend a once a week pottery class presented by Audrey Frank (1905-1990) at the Frank Joubert Art Centre in Rondebosch, Cape Town. He felt that “with the combination of head and hand something might emerge if I gave it a go, which I did”.82 He commissioned a continental-style potter’s kick-wheel, bought clay and took over the corner of a sign- writing workshop in Long Street.

The unfolding of his career as studio potter is narrated in his unpublished memoirs titled A Few Remembrances. During a visit to England in 1956, having already come to know about the Leach studio, he visited studio potteries in Cornwall and met Quick at Tregenna Hill. Quick mentioned that Leach had a vacancy at his St. Ives studio and Rabinowitz went to be interviewed by him. Having already made plans to crew a yacht back to South Africa, Rabinowitz could not give Leach a definite commitment to take up the vacancy. The crewing opportunity did not materialise but Quick offered to take on Rabinowitz as studio assistant for a six month period. As assistant he had to mix clay in a bucket and deliver by bus the pots packed in a haversack, to customers. During this period he met Cardew who was preparing to return to Abuja, at the Wenford Bridge studio. In 1957, Rabinowitz made his way to Kano in Nigeria where Cardew was setting up another training centre. The meeting in Nigeria was a social one and Rabinowitz did not engage in any studio pottery.

He returned to South Africa late in 1957 and was offered studio space at Higgovale where he built a wood-fired kiln. Sonja Gerlings (1942-) who would later achieve recognition in her own right as a studio potter, joined him at Higgovale. For a six month period in 1961/1962, Rabinowitz worked as assistant to Bosch in White River and then returned to Cape Town to set up his final studio at Eagle’s Nest. A financial award by the Cape Tercentenary Foundation enabled Rabinowitz to visit England once again and this time Cardew, who by then had abandoned his work in Nigeria, agreed to take him on as assistant at Wenford Bridge. Cardew, recalled Rabinowitz,83 did not ‘teach’ but demanded of his students to observe, practice and “listen to his sophisticated opinions”. There was also time to visit Leach who told Rabinowitz that he had been given a very favourable report by Cardew. At last, in 1974, Rabinowitz met Hamada during a visit to Japan in 1974.

After nearly four decades of studio pottery, Rabinowitz was awarded a silver medal for Singular Merit and Rare Achievement by the University of Pretoria in 1990. The award of “Master Potter” was bestowed on him by the Association of Potters of South Africa in 1990 and in 1992 he received an honorary masters degree in Fine Art from the University of Cape Town. Bosch was the only other South African studio potter to be honored with the title of ‘Master Potter’.

The studio potter and writer Ann Marais84 summarised it correctly by stating that though Rabinowitz had his roots in the Anglo-Oriental tradition, “he appears to have used it as a springboard in his search for simple truths that express his individual viewpoint of what is of value i.e. beauty and usefulness”. It was all about the pot: to be useful, and attractive to the eye and touch: “There is no artifice, no ‘cleverness’ in his strong, simple forms. Form, surface and decoration are integrated in harmonious balance. There are no trivial appendages to distract the eye or block the hand in holding. All elements serve the goal of ‘usefulness’.”85

For Calder,86 the ways in which Rabinowitz and Bosch developed their materials, technique, form and decoration, serve to emphasise that their work had a distinct South African self-identity and that they established “a working visual vocabulary – an idiom - of SA ceramics.”

Tim Morris was an artist and studio potter who started his career as an admirer of the Pop movement-influenced British art of the 1960s.87 Born in Windsor, Berkshire, England, attended the St. Martin’s School of Art from 1960 to 1962 where he studied water-colour techniques and received his National Diploma in Design, majoring in painting. Upon graduating from St. Martin’s, Morris enrolled at London University for a teacher’s training diploma. Whilst studying for his diploma, a lecturer at the University, Bill Newland (1919- 1998) fostered in Morris an interest in ceramics and advised him to enrol at the Central School of Art, London. Before doing so, Morris spent July 1963 teaching pottery at Catford School, London. At the Central School of Art he studied pottery under several of Britain’s acknowledged ceramic teachers including (1919-2009) with whom he also worked for a short time as her ‘skivvy’88 and Kenneth Clark (1922-2012). The training at the Central School of Art laid the foundation for Morris’ pottery even though he considered his teachers “… far too over-intellectual, creating in most students the ability to think ‘big thoughts’ and due to technical shortcomings never reach a similar standard in work”.89 After graduating in 1964, Morris was given the opportunity to work as site artist under the renowned British archaeologist, Dame Kathleen Kenyon (1906-1978), at a dig in Jerusalem, . Tim made drawings of pottery and could see and study comprehensive collections of ancient Middle-East pottery and clay vessels, dating back to the pre-pottery Neolithic period of Jericho.

In 1965 Morris’s father offered him the use of the family summer seaside cottage at Hermanus and there for a while he continued with his portraiture while exploring the possibility of starting a pottery studio and workshop. He made contact with Rabinowitz at the Eagles Nest studio and it was there that he met the studio potter Helen Martin (Dunstan) (1942-). The two decided, somewhat spontaneously, to establish a studio together. The under-capitalised project got underway in the Orchards suburb of Johannesburg but the partnership dissolved after two years. Morris then secured an appointment as lecturer at the Johannesburg College of Art for 1966 and 1967. He married his wife Marlene in 1970 and set out to build a home and his Ngwenya Studio on property in the Muldersdrift region.

The work he produced in the 1970s was described by John Dewar90 as having shapes that “are decided, direct and complete in themselves” with “embellishment of a minimal design in glazes, some illustrative [having] just enough meaning.” Journalists visiting the Ngwenya Studio wrote of their impressions of iron oxide, manganese, cobalt and rutile, boulder-blue trickling over stone-grey, red rock-brown, vlei-green, chocolate-brown, the gold of winter grass and deep velvety black with rich russet designs. His decorative motifs were drawn from nature: stylised butterflies, birds, seeds, grasses, and flowers created with a few careful sweeps of the brush.91 Walters92 who worked in Morris’ studio during 1969 said of his work and lifestyle: “Tim needed to produce a lot of pots, and he needed to make money. He was impatient too, at one stage, decorating his pots on the wheel as he was throwing them. He had loads of energy - up early, doing the physical work of packing kilns - and we often went out to dinner while the oil kiln was firing - and then back to the pottery to check on progress. He was exhausting… He needed people, he enjoyed their adulation, he loved selling people pots, and the studio was a high energy, popular place… and of course he attracted oddballs who basked in his giving nature.”

In an interview with Jenny Hobbs,93 he scoffed at the “gobbledy-gook” of art critics and was critical of what he called ‘intellectualising’: “All I’m trying to do is simply make things with a bit of magic in them. There’s no message in my work. I’m not trying to challenge or educate anybody, just making what I think is beautiful. A lot of the soul-searching that goes on in the arts is really like people turning over rocks to find what’s underneath. The sort of remark that really pleases me is when someone says, ‘That’s a super pot, I like it.’”

Clark94 commented that: “[Morris] does not subscribe to the aggrandisement of pottery as an expensive elitist art form” and his wife Marlene95 recalls that he would urge buyers to “use the bloody stuff, don’t put it on the wall!” To the journalist Sally de Vasconcellos96 he claimed that he was striving but failing “to be a humble, simple craftsman, in a very non- humble, materialistic world”.

When Andrew Walford met Hamada at his studio in Mashiko, Japan in 1969, he showed Hamada some of his own pots but warned him in advance that “if anything is wrong with my pots then it is your fault ‘cause you did not explain it sufficiently in [Leach’s The Potter's Book]”.97 Hamada, says Walford, was one of many before whom he prostrated himself to learn what to do and what not to do, but he then “ jumped on taxis and buses for the journey of life and hopefully to get off close to home.”98 The other eminent studio potters and ceramists he encountered included Leach, Cardew and Rie in England, and in Sweden the Scandinavian Modernists Stig Lindberg (1916-1982) and Lisa Larsen (1931-).

Walford stands out amongst the 20th century South African studio potters who in person experienced and assimilated a vast reference world of studio pottery. He travelled extensively in the East and Far East, Europe and the Scandinavian countries, worked at the Gustavberg Factory in Sweden, and taught at the Hamburg Academy of Art in Germany. In recent years he visited South Korea to participate in the Geyonggi International Ceramix Biennales and Mungyeong Tea Bowl Festivals where he further absorbed Far Eastern studio pottery aesthetics. The English-born Walford enrolled for studies in commercial art and sculpture at the Durban Art School which he quickly abandoned. He then apprenticed to the potteries of first Aiden Walsh [1932-2009] and afterwards to Sammy Liebermann (1925-1984). In 1961 he opened his own studio in Durban and began producing stoneware in an electric kiln. The years 1964 to 1968 were spent in Europe after which he returned to South Africa to establish a studio in Pinetown and then at Shongweni, the latter where he continues his work.

The Scandinavian influence on his work has for the most part been ‘washed out’, said Clark.99 What is more evident, is an Anglo-Oriental aesthetic and an Oriental ethos. He accepts the label of being the last flag-bearer of the Anglo-Orientalists but “those are shoes that pinch”.100 At best it can be said that the Anglo-Oriental methodology which he perpetuates in his work, is the gathering and preparation of natural materials, repetitive throwing, reduction-firing, simplicity of form and decoration, and the focus on utilitarian works. He dismisses anything that is ersatz in substance and appearance: “… and, most important for me … the finished piece [must have] charm - that, for me, is the most important quality - charm never ages. It is always enlightening and refreshing to see and feel a piece that has this magic, this timeless, innocent quality. If one is too calculating, the innocence and soul of the piece is lost.”101

Ian Glenny abandoned his fine art studies for which he enrolled at the Natal Technicon in the early 1970s. Disenchanted with what he was being taught, he opted to become a studio potter and set up his first studio in the suburb of Berea in Durban. In 1976 he acquired land in Dargle in a picturesque valley on which he built a large, sprawling studio, where he would work till 2003 when he was afflicted by crippling arthritis.

His contact with the established studio potters other than Andrew Walford who had his studio close by in Shongweni, was limited. Walford became his principal guiding force if not his mentor. Of all the 20th century South African studio potters, Glenny was the one who immersed himself in the mingei school of thought whose ‘artist-craftsmen’ differed from the ‘urban dilettante’ just as real brew stood in opposition to instant coffee.”102 For Glenny, ‘real brew’ entailed sourcing and preparing clays and organic ash glazes in his local environment, and in the process of throwing, decorating and firing to imbue his work with a contemporary interpretation of mingei.103 His studio output of utilitarian wares was prolific and amongst those works were masterful individual pieces. Being a realist, Glenny knew that the market for collector pieces was too small to support his studio and he therefore introduced new lines in his range of utilitarian ware to cater for the preferences of a tourism market. It was a practical consideration to find a balance between maintaining “puritan aesthetics” in creating collector’s items and financial survival through the production of commercial ware. Few if any of the potters could by the turn of the century afford the luxury of the “nobility of poverty”.104

Glenny never created form for the sake of form or decoration for the sake of decoration but sought an organic relationship between form and decoration. The best of his creations, wrote Cruise,105 employed a process of double and triple dip glazing and through the glazes he achieved the “fat waxiness, richness and depth that are the hallmarks of the best reduced stoneware”.

Cardew said to Clark106 that: “… the artist who is an innovator is also the only true traditional artist…”. The studio potters David Schlapobersky and Felicity Potter meet those criteria in honouring many of the dictates of the early Anglo-Orientalists but rendering and communicating their work in a contemporary language. Their Bukkenburg pottery studio in the historical town of Swellendam in the Western Cape province is where they live by the dictum that ‘art is life and how you live it’ and a commitment to “to add good art and craft, and usefulness to daily life…”.107

The Bukkenburg Studio was founded in 1996 but is preceded by more than 20 years of work in Johannesburg where Schlapobersky and Potter ran studios in Halfway House, Parkwood and Parkview. Their studio pottery careers started when they involved Morris in setting up a pottery workshop at Cresset House, a school and training centre in Halfway House for children in need of special care. Within two years Cresset House’s studio was producing works that were welcomed at exhibitions. The studio pottery partners then set up an independent studio in Johannesburg where they worked until they relocated to Swellendam in 1996.

Theirs is a partnership of perfect equilibrium, with Schlapobersky throwing and slabbing an extensive and diverse range of utilitarian and decorative lines, and Potter doing the fluid, confident and unrestrained brushwork decorating. “The tradition of the pioneer potters”, maintains Schlapobersky, “… is flourishing in an African context where the link between function and aesthetics retains its harmony and integrity, and takes on a new meaning from the physical landscape of Africa as well as local and ethnic art and craft.”108 Schlapobersky and Potter, Walters, Wilhelm, Andrew Walford and other practitioners of studio pottery producing utilitarian wares survived the late 20th century shift in consumers’ taste for ‘modern’ wares, a preference shaped as much by fashion as affordability. The highly competitive consumer market of the late 1970’s and onwards did not afford everyone the luxury of indulging in wares that embodied the concepts of the ‘silent potter’ nor of ‘silent pot’. Utilitarian studio pottery was being challenged on many fronts, including by technological advances and in teaching. Schlapobersky identifies: “… the impact of the very fast pace of developments in ceramic materials and equipment: bright, low-temperature overglaze and underglaze colours; the ready supply of a vast array of bisqueware; prepared clays and glazes. It was no longer necessary for people to build their own kilns or mix their own clays and glazes, industry was beginning to take care of that, and the new generation was gaining freedom to explore new forms of inspiration, and taking aspects of studio pottery and ceramics in general into a variety of new avenues of expression. Teaching was changing too. Technique and tradition seemingly inferior to notions of freedom to express oneself; and the environment which was characterised by the demanding requirements of acquiring the necessary context, conventions and grounding in aspects of basic design, skills, science and technology, and traditions, had given way to a totally different milieu with quite new priorities and possibilities.”109

There was also the disdain of the established art community towards the earlier studio pottery aesthetics and even the Association of Potters of Southern Africa stood accused of robbing the studio potters of recognition. Shapiro110 lamented the dominance of objects over sculpture, and of vessels over pots at the 1987 Corobrik National Ceramics exhibition and “… the measure of success achieved by the ceramicists in their relentless campaign to drive the potters to some dark places where tenmoku [the iron-rich, black-brown glaze] presumably is the colour and function is the purpose.”

Even earlier, in 1978, Andrew Walford went as far to argue that a special category should be created in national competitions to judge and display work produced by ‘traditional potters’ as opposed to the work of what he described as “people who are creating objects in clay”: “If a ceramist has bought his clay ready-pugged, copies something that was ‘fashionable’ overseas fifteen years ago, goes to a potter, sprays on a glaze and somebody else fires the piece, I feel sad for that piece and that person. But, after all, the insta-piece could be a much better pot or sculpture than others. But, normally, one glance at the foot of a pot or at the clay line of a sculpture tells all.”111

In reading the lives and works of the earlier South African studio potters, we find enough evidence that the ‘Anglo-Oriental’ was stripped of much of its ‘Anglo’ and that the ‘Oriental’ as embodied in mingei ethics and aesthetics, came to the fore. To a lesser or greater degree, Afro-Oriental embodies the mingei tenets of being produced by a dedicated craftsman (or at least a craftsman-artist), in the spirit of tradition, with natural materials, made modest in form and decoration, for utilitarian purposes, and with a timeless beauty.

A valid argument can be made that the influence of a post-Nigeria Cardew, was far more profound because of the ‘shared Africa experience’. Africa had its own indigenous materials and robust forms, and the African physical landscape offered its own sources of inspiration for decorative work. The European studio potters in the country also did not stand isolated from the ethnic cultures but explored, shared, traded and mutually benefitted from interacting with indigenous potters. Time and again, the South Africans specifically identified themselves with South Africa and Africa, and expressed that identity in generous visual and tactile experiences springing from a reference world with a unique physical environment and a multi-cultural footprint.

Green, who in the the mid- and late-1990s was commissioned to produce utilitarian wares for several big South African game lodges, could indulge in his passion for nature and explored the theme in sgraffito drawings and earthy glazes. He had earlier worked in rural settings at the Kolonyama Studio in Lesotho and at the Mantenga Craft Centre in Swaziland, the former which produced the typical slip-trailed and combed decorative work of Joe Finch and which Green carried over in his own work.112 The same idiom of utilitarian wares were produced at Izandla Pottery in the former Republic of Transkei where Scott was the studio manager from 1979 to 1984. Scott then set up his own Hillford Pottery studio in KwaZulu-Natal. He abandoned “the Leach tradition [because it came to be] all too rigid and patriarchal. ... Besides, my interior landscape bore no resemblance to the relaxed, rounded, son-of-mother-earth type said to be self-evident in those who excel in the [Leach] tradition.”113 Though he rejected one traditionalist, he was captivated by the creative approach of another: Hamada’s “flair for vigorous irregularity”.114 Scott, wrote Cruise,115 sought to “retain the vigour of the wet thrown forms”, and that he rejected self- individuality by creating pots that would “[perform] the perfect intention of the composer”.

Elza Sullivan (1935-), who retired as studio potter in 2010, was a leading exponent of utilitarian ware and for whom form was in tension with expression. As the mingei philosophy would want it, Sullivan was the potter who “somewhere fitted into the process of making pottery so that the pot was all about itself.”116 Patton emigrated from Ireland to South Africa in 1982 to set up a studio near that of Morris. He says he see-sawed between being a craftsman-potter and an artist-potter, but rather than be dictated by any philosophy he settled down to work by the simple dictum of the Irish that “a pot … has to have a function or else it is of no use”.117

Walters, who is now a specialist in bespoke porcelain utilitarian wares, continues producing reduction-fired stoneware of “useful bowls, mugs, jugs and so on.”118 It is specifically in his large chargers decorated with abstract landscapes or in a rich combed tenmoku glaze, that he reveals his African inspiration: “… our raw materials, the clay we need, the heat we use, reflects the essence of Africa”.119 There is simply no way that the work of Digby Hoets can be received other than being distinctively African in spirit and look. He has been involved with clay since 1972 when he attended weekly pottery classes. In the following year he started teaching wheelwork and by 1976 he had built his first high-temperature, reduction-fired studio kiln. His earlier works were functional pieces that fitted into the ‘Anglo-Oriental’ mould but which, with Hoets’ preference for clean and crisp forms and decorations, made them stand quite distinctive within the genre. In 1983 he switched from domestic utilitarian wares to making very large, open-necked pots. Of Hoet’s pots, Cruise120 wrote: “They are made from African clays and glazed with the ash from indigenous hardwood trees. They take on the colours of the veld; the grey-greens of the hardwood trees, the ochres, browns and washed out textures of a winter on the highveld. They express a love for the landscape that seamlessly and inchoately melds from the vision of the craftsman to a physical manifestation in the forms of the pots.”

Amongst the current career studio potters with a specific focus on utilitarian works, who infuse their oeuvres to various degrees with elements of the ‘Anglo’ and the ‘Oriental’ but encapsulate those in distinctive expressive guises, are Schlapobersky and Potter at Bukkenburg Pottery in Swellendam, Andrew Walford, de Beer at Longkloof Pottery in Hout Bay, Wilhelm in Somerset West, Wells at Pumplenook Pottery near Plettenberg Bay, John Ellis (1966-) in Betty’s Bay, Graham Bolland (1955-) in Van Wyksdorp, Anton van der Merwe (1950-) at Starways Pottery in Hogsback, Paul Andrew de Jongh (1970-) at Millstone Pottery in McGregor, Nico Liebenberg (1959-) with a studio halfway between Paarl and Stellenbosch, Garth Meyer (1957-) in Riebeek-Kasteel, and Christo Giles (1970- ) in Welcome Glen, Cape Town. De Jongh and van der Merwe are the only studio potters with wood-fired kilns. Walford’s reduction-fired works, decorated with Japanese brushes or drizzled with thick, chunky glazes have an undeniable oriental appearance. He also occasionally produces rustic-looking wares with encrusted surfaces in a very old Japanese style known as shigaraki. Giles in particular has been successful in stripping down the pot to its bare, austere but most elegant form with classic shino, tenmoku and sang de boeuf glazes over super-smooth, or facetted or geometrically textured surfaces.

None of the South African studio potters have attempted to put into writing what they mean by admiring and sometimes pursuing ‘Oriental’ aesthetics. One must assume, with the known exceptions of Shapiro, Andrew Walford and Glenny who are self-proclaimed Zen-inspired potters, that their attention is focussed more on the physical rather than the philosophical expression of such aesthetics. Nevertheless one can detect in their works an affinity with the Japanese aesthetics of wabi (subdued, austere, understated beauty), sabi (rustic patina), and iki (refined style).121 Chinese aesthetics are even more difficult to define and it must suffice that it evolves around qi, translated as vitality or the ‘breath of life’. Applied to art and craft, qi goes beyond the surface to not only evoke the spirit of the subject but in doing so, become itself the subject with its own qi.122

It is far more valid to argue that Oriental aesthetics are reflected rather than embodied in ‘Afro-Oriental’ but that there is a strong alignment with the Oriental craft ethics in the selection of (mostly) natural materials, the forms which fit the purpose, and the presence of the potter’s hand in all of the processes. The wares represent an evolved tradition of craft in which the pot and not the potter, is the first focus of attention. This holds true for any pot created by any ‘traditional’ studio potter in any part of the world but amongst such South African studio potters, it is affirmed in the very Oriental-derived manner of texture and decoration.

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