Celestial bodies: "…things of Beauty Growing... " Michael Cardew

Korean porcelain vase,  Choson dynasty c. 1650-1700 

© Fitzwilliam Museum

This large 'moon jar' is one of my favourite pieces in the Fitzwilliam ceramics galleries. Unlike this photo,  it shines milky white and the lighting in its display case throws curving highlights on its sides. You can see the rivulets where the viscous white glaze has run down the sides and almost see the ridge where the two thrown hemispherical halves were joined together by the potter with wet clay when leather hard.  This matching would take very great skill, but any faults resulting in the firing were accepted in Korean philosophy as nature at work.   It represents the Confucian ideals of purity and simplicity which were admired by Choson scholars and courtiers - works of art which were in fact storage jars for rice or wine.  

This one below belonged to Bernard Leach and was a gift to Lucie Rie who kept it in her studio. It shows the firing faults of unevenness around the join, the grit particles in the glaze and specks of ash from the kiln, all features admired by the Koreans for the natural freedom of the firing process.  Few of this large size survived the firing stresses intact.

   

18th C. Choson glazed white porcelain moon jar  (ht. 47.5 cms)  acquired by Leach in Korea, 1935

© British Museum

These rare surviving Moon jars have inspired contemporary potters from Bernard Leach to Park Young-sook today, for their serenity and their technical challenge,  and there are several interpretations in the current Fitzwilliam ceramics exhibition, Things of Beauty Growing: British studio pottery .  

  Intertidal Jar, stoneware with Waun Llodi clay,  ht. 36 cm.    © Adam Buick  2011

Adam Buick now concentrates on the challenge of creating Moon jars ('hang-ari)  from small to large, using Pembrokeshire clays from near his studio, in close relation with the landscape.   He uses local earth and stone inclusions in both bodies and glazes,  often stones and seaweed collected from the beach, which fire with very unpredictable results. 

Moon jar,  ht. 27.5 cms.   Adam Buick, 2012
© British Museum 

The inclusion stripes in this modern pot are formed by rolling brown clay into the porcelain clay before throwing, so the stripes appear randomly as the moon jar is turning on the wheel.  Compare it with this medieval Chinese vase:

Chinese Song dynasty stoneware vase, c. 960-1279 

© Fitzwilliam Museum

The unusual striped decoration shows the ancient potter's varying control of the brush-strokes, reacting  to the momentum as the vase turns on the wheel.  It is displayed next a twentieth century piece -  William Staite Murray's tall striped vase, The Bather. 

The spacious exhibition explores modern studio pottery through the basic shapes of  vase, bowl, charger, and set, and also as monument,  as well as the different techniques and materials used.  

Halima Cassell is represented by The Virtue of Unity, a current work of 36 bowls,  using clays from around the globe, which she carves when just firmer than leather hard.  Each one is different, with an origami-like complexity of folds, and interchanging positive and negative spaces, as in printmaker M.C. Escher's optical illusions. These include apertures, some of which are only seen by the shadows the lighting casts around them.

Halima Cassell at work 



The Virtue of Unity    Halima Cassell  2009- 2017
(photo from studiopottery.co.uk)

The title of this major exhibition is taken from a the words of an interview with Michael Cardew (1901-1983). 

"…if you trust your material and you trust your instincts, you will see things of beauty growing up in front of you…"  Michael Cardew

[quoted from Simon Olding's review: see researchuca.ac.uk]

Images for a wet April

April, 2002  Wilhelmina Barns-Graham 

Courtesy the Barns-Graham Charitable Trust

Here are some poems from a gentler age to console us during this endless wet, grey April,  beginning with Thomas Hardy's counterpoint second verse to his Maytime "This is the weather the cuckoo likes" .

"This is the weather the shepherd shuns
And so do I,
When beeches drip in browns and duns,
And thresh and ply;
And hill-hid tides throb, throe on throe,
And meadow rivulets overflow,
And drops on gate bars hang in a row,
And rooks in families homeward go,
And so do I."

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

Budding elms, Mayfield, April 1901   Sarah Paxton Ball Dodson 1847-1906

© Manchester City Art Gallery

If Hardy does not lift the spirits a little, Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Inversnaid" is a great poem to recite to vent frustration:

"This darksome burn, horseback brown
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

A windpuff-bonnet of fawn-froth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, fell frowning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

Degged with dew, dappled with dew,
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet."

Inversnaid  G. M. Hopkins  1876-1889


And writers and artists travelling in distant countries dream of English springs:

Taj Mahal from the Fort,  April 1878,    Marianne North, botanical artist

On loan to the British Library from Kew Botanical Gardens

"Oh shall I never, never be home again?
Meadows of England shining in the rain
Spread wide your daisied lawns: your ramparts green
With briar fortify, with blossoms screen
Till my far morning - and O streams that slow
And pure and deep through plains and playlands go,
For me your love and all your kingcups store,
And - dark militia of a southern shore,
Old fragrant friends - preserve me the last lines
Of that long saga which you sung me, pines,
When, lonely boy, beneath the chosen tree,
I listened, with my eyes upon the sea.
Brumana   James Elroy Flecker

This month too saw sailors, far from home, fight the deciding battle of the American War of Independence, when Admiral Rodney defeated the French in the West Indies in 1782.

Battle of 'the Saints', April 12, 1782    Thomas Lunn

©  National Maritime Museum   Greenwich

April Labours: the promise of abundance

These April flowers come from the Labours of the Months series in the famous Rose Window of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Lausanne, Switzerland.  It is the work of an intinerant artist from Picardy,  one Peter of Arras,  dated c. 1231-35.

And here I show my ignorance:  is this man bringing spring flowers indoors from the outside to welcome spring, or even to store like herbs in a rather grand cupboard, or is that a window shutter he is opening to show the new clover growing in abundance?   His headdress could be a crown or a garland,  personifying April, holding large bunches of purple trefoil and perhaps alfalfa, or other fodder plant; his gown is also decorated with flower patterns.

Figure of April, from the Rose Window, Cathedral of Notre Dame, Lausanne, Switzerland 

It is a masterly piece of design, interpreting the typical April Labours motif of spring flowers in an unusual style, to suit its ecclesiastic setting.  Notice how his foot brings him outside the circular frame and the sense of movement in the plants and his robes.  

Set in the Cathedral's great Rose window, and its detail not all visible to the naked eye, its christian message seems to read of good husbandry and the promise of abundance.

Today is Easter Sunday in the UK and although some snow is forecast, primroses are blooming at the end of my road.  Happy Easter!