You may have more in common with your cups than you think

How pots have a handle on our stregnth & fragility

Around 1991 I impulsively ended a long term relationship & moved out of the safe shared house that I'd lived in with the girlfriend I'd met at Uni ten years previously. For three or four months I enjoyed a lively madcap adventure of sculpture, travel & photography as well as new friends and a new, and naturally doomed, business venture

It was a manic episiode, not that I knew or cared and after it had run it's course I found myself in an unfamiliar world at 29, The Street, Aldermaston with a whole load of new possessions and not a lot of my old ones, a self-pillaged bank account & a bowel-curdling fear of the future

Aldermaston is mainly known on account of it's connection with WMD and I guess a lot of people wouldn't know there's a village there at all. There is & it has a pub, post office & shop as well as a Manor House whose owners let the locals walk in it's grounds. It's a friendly place, and the best refuge I could possibly have hoped for with such a headful of nonsense

As well as the pub and the post office there's also a pottery which was then employing seven or so potters. They used local willow wood to fuel the kilns & the clay was often hand dug nearby. It was run by Alan Caiger-Smith, who, although I didn't realise it then, is a giant in the ceramic world

I was drawn to the pottery and to the people in it as well as to this magic way of making in such a self contained, organic way. And, luckily for me, I was welcomed



 

This is the throwing room at the pottery with two of the potters, Lou and Ursula. They were playing up as I was fumbling with the camera and the picture works largely by accident, somehow managing to explain something of the pottery's exuberance and creativity.

I love how Lou's gesture appears to be dispensing with time, in the shape of the pottery clock. I could identify with that & felt certain solidarity with Lou as image; it helped me realise that I wasn't the only one to have ever had a reckless throw of the dice.

 

Maybe on account of this Lou & I became friends & during the friendship Lou gave me several pieces of work including this earthenware cup and saucer:



This was her own work as opposed to the more mannered pieces that the pottery produced and all the more special to me for that reason

Pottery is the earliest craft, probably discovered accidently via clay hardened under a hunter-gatherers' fire. Humans have grown, even evolved with pots; we use the same language to descibe ourselves physically as we do vessels. We share neck and shoulder, belly and feet with them as well as a mouth and lips. The Potter Bernard Leach goes further than this and suggests that pots also share strength, fragility & quietness with us

I didn't feel any of this then in an articulate way but in the topsey turvey days and months when the enormity of turning your own life upside down becomes a flat-lining reality, the turmoil I'd wake with would take some distraction. I'd make coffee with Lou's Cup and would feel less worse. It lent me windows of calmness because there was something there that I could share my fragility and quietness with. And later, strength too. It was a godsend

Two or three years went by & the pottery was starting to close. Lou was moving on & one day appeared with the plates below 

casually & gracefully handing them to me. It was a while before I realised that she wasn't just giving them to me for safekeeping & I was touched. They became the feast plates on account of their gargantuan size and I loved them instantly. I love them still, because of what they are: accessories of celebration, and, ipso facto, for what they helped me regain: celebration itself

All clay pots were once earth, and, because of their colour and weight, the feast plates remind you of this. They're not pretending to be anything other than raw fired earth that's had just enough adjustment to allow you to eat, clean and store them. And just enough decoration to let you know that although they're understated, they have form. And with this lack of artifice, they can take you back to the first hunter-gatherers' fire, and help you to understand the quietness of your place in the world



The strength, fragility & quietness that vessels can meaningfully share with us could be extended to include the qualities of flaws & weaknesses. And the capacity for playfulness. The bowl above has the beauty of counter intuitive rhyme to it as the curve of the brush responds to the curve of the bowl itself. Playfully. And the glaze drips and finger marks flaw it. It was the last vessel that Lou gave to me and it came with an understanding that playfulness & the beauty of flaws & weakness, not to mention beauty itself, are all intertwined



Here's Lou in the pottery: Anyone familar with the work of 'The Pottery, Aldermaston' will recognise the characteristic brush strokes just visible on the bowl she's painting and also on the bowls behind.

Something real remains for me within this photograph. A ghostly angel maybe, perpetually painting with an quiet grace and turning clay into metaphor



Before Lou left we took a trip to the Atlas mountains in Morrocco and after that the patterns shifted and our lives took different paths. So this is Lou & how I'd like to remember her. 

 

Irrepressable, optimistic &  crackling with enthusiasm for the start of the day.