Gardener and writer Stephen Anderton has spent a career working with touch and sight in unison, skills he has transferred to the appreciation of pots. As a collector, he describes the pleasures to be had in the creative conclusions of glaze and form – luxuries not shared in the ever-changing arena of the garden…
In a niche on the bookshelves of a care-home bedroom sits an ovoid pottery vase, smooth below the waist, corrugated above, modest of mouth, a mixture of sandy greys. Why on earth would anybody want to touch it? It fills the space and that is all. Larkin got it right: ‘Home is so sad. The music in the piano stool. That vase.’
And yet a great pot can have you longing to touch it, should have you longing to touch it. Wasn’t it Hamada who said a pot can be simple, like a houseplant, or as fascinating as an ancient tree growing out of the mountain side? I know which I would want to touch.
Anne Mette Hjortshøj, Vase
That care-home pot was a houseplant pot, sweet but thoughtless; what we in this household call a ‘John Lewis’ pot. Even gardeners (and I speak as one) who might value a beautifully grown houseplant would have little time for that. What gardeners often find appealing in ceramics is not the potter’s earthy pleasures in handling clay but the way a finished pot does eventually conclude a creative process, both of creator and materials. In gardens, the plants and the environment are forever unstoppably changing, and if that natural process is lively then so must be the mind of the gardener to manage it; but once a pot is made that attempt at creation, at an idea, is fixed. What a relief that must be, says the gardener; that never happens to me.
If gardeners spend life with their hands in the soil and around plants, when it comes to pots, their urge to handle and to touch is as strong as you might imagine – an urge to turn things upside down, to discover the detail, to see what is going on underneath, be it pest or pattern. It’s why in galleries I spend as much time on my knees as I do standing. Why doesn’t everybody do that, I wonder? Think again of that tree on the mountainside: you walk up to it from below, you face it eye-to-eye and explore its colour, weight and texture, and then having walked past, look down on it from above. It takes time.
Trees near Mashiko, Japan
More than in European gardens, Japanese gardens like to show plants, the history of whose aging, is displayed as a part of their charm and their story. Think of those haggard pines strapped up on forests of vertical poles, without which they would collapse into the lake they overhang. To a gardener, pots can be a relief from that, from the need to be forever managing the urgency of decay. Yet still – and here is the wonder of a truly fascinating pot, a ‘mountainside’ pot – its active history may well be there written and frozen in the glaze itself. The movement of the glaze over the form of the pot, and its final fixed resolution, is a story which in the hands of a great potter (and his experience of managing chance in the kiln) has huge fascination. It is time on display.
Ken Matsuzaki, Vase
There are pots which are given an artificial history, a ‘man-made’ history, by breaking and gluing with gold, but I find that an intellectual process which leaves me cold. It is the skill of the potter to manage the natural processes which moves me more, without that secondary intervention, that secondary, back-up attempt to give the pot meaning. The greatest craftsmanship, surely, is to put it there in the first place.
And so I ask myself, what is it about some still hugely accomplished pots that fail to demand to be touched and explored, that somehow fail to have that visceral appeal – to a gardener or to anyone else? Why are some pots perhaps complete in themselves – self-contained, inscrutable – and others more naturally interactive and inviting?
Akiko Hirai, Vase
That self-containment can be located in the glaze. As I have described, glaze can express a story of its own flowing development around the form of the pot. But at the opposite extreme it can be exquisitely, single-mindedly unpatterned and monochrome, the most immaculate sheath only, of celadon perhaps, which requires nothing other than you should admire its inner glow and translucency and the craftsmanship which created it. I have a superb porcelain celadon vase by Jaejun Lee which has just this quality. And yet still it asks to be touched. Its appeal to the sense of touch is perhaps in capturing exactly the moment the mouth of the vase begins to open – not tight, not slack, but ready. The urge to lift it with two palms, to weigh that moment of perfection is irresistible. Like tipping the face of a perfect rose in full bloom.
Takeshi Yasuda, Vase
And yet form too can sometimes be so self-contained that it discourages participation. There is something about the classic large moon jar which, though attractive, can be closed-in and ungenerous, the mouth too tiny for the volume of the whole. I find an ancient Korean moon jar, dark and weathered, leaves me dumbstruck with respect, though not wanting to touch or lift it. Yet in the finest, most utterly perfect, modern version of that, in smooth porcelain, I find the result can be cold as stone: it is almost a gauntlet thrown down by the maker. You do better, it says! Noli me tangere. No wonder such pots are so often shown with a poised twig of hazel or cherry piercing the sphincter. I much prefer my Jaejun Lee, opening like a flower, or about to give birth.
Kang-hyo Lee, Moon Jar
Sometimes I find a pot can get past such an aura of inscrutability by playing a different game with its form, by mixing messages. I have a tight-mouthed four-sided slab-work vase by Shinjo Suzuki, bearing a glaze whose frozen downward pourings have huge appeal for me. Yet it might be just another less than wonderful, tight-mouthed pot were it not for the fact that the four sides of the pot are out of square. It is somehow wounded. That narrow mouth is then understood as part of the grimness of the form and handling the pot is to sympathise with and explore its imperfections. It invites conversation. It’s a pot everyone wants to handle, not just this gardener. There is so much going on there.
Sometimes a pot’s ability to discourage touch can be in its decoration rather than its form. Geometric and symmetric decoration on a plate or bowl can be so powerful and satisfying that handling it seems beside the point: it is a pot meant above all to be seen and used; enjoyed around a table. All those wonderful fishy plates and platters, or Iznik tulips!
Phil Rogers, Jar
At the opposite end of the decorative spectrum there are pots like Grayson Perry’s urns, where amusing scenes from modern life and fantasy are played out upon the surface of a large Classical vase. There is irony there too, in the relationship between the comedy depicted in the decoration and the sober form of the pot. But the wacky goings-on in the decoration narrate a particular pace and momentum, at odds with the sober, static form of the pot. Rather they use the pot only as a kind of 365-degree stage. The last thing I would want to do is pick one up, even if I could lift it. They are meant for strolling round, set out of reach on a high plinth, where you can enjoy seeing the pictures and, if one stays the course, thinking about the irony. Does the lack of a richer, more constructive relationship between form and decoration matter? No, it is entertaining; but for me it does not make a great pot. I leave literally empty-handed.
Toshihiko Takeda, Vase
Which takes me back to the kind of minimalist brushed decoration favoured by the great Japanese potters and Anglo-Japanese school. Decoration alone can indeed invite you to handle a pot, lift it high and to the light, want to see it from different angles and see how the decoration has been made to relate to the form. A reed, a bulrush, three simple strokes that might be an abstraction of the former. So little, so lightly done, and yet the invitation is compelling. The truly finest pot, with the finest stroke, in the perfect place, is rare even for a master. These judgements may be personal of course, but with great pots history usually offers the final decision. When a master potter gets it absolutely right, there is a rare fusion of ambitions and successes – in the visual form, in the glaze and the story it tells, in any subsequent more deliberate decoration, and in the texture and heft and personality of the pot, all of which will make one want to handle the pot, to get to know it better, properly, intimately. And again and again over time. Like an old friend.
As a compulsive handler of pots, I am puzzled by the tendency to display and (more so since lock-downs) to sell pots on a ‘look-only’ basis, in galleries and in museums. Exquisitely photographed pots will sell unseen and unhandled, and three may sell better than one, like ducks on a wall. (Edmund de Waal is known to the general public for collections of exquisitely simple white porcelain beakers, almost more than for the individual beakers themselves.) Rightly or wrongly this growing tendency to market pots as clusters or congregations is an invitation to disengage with the individual pot and to focus on their arrangement instead. If you pick one up, will you put it back in the right place? Certainly, when the V&A arranges its de Waals high around the dome of its ceramics gallery the opportunity, never mind the temptation to touch is flatly denied. Who could touch?
What a loss this is. Because even texture alone can compel someone to touch, like lichen on a boulder, the coruscations of some great tree trunk, or the veins running down a long, slippery leaf. Slips and glazes arranged with the hand can show so much directional momentum that one is often compelled to trace their progress with a finger. I’ve seen little ever to outdo the sheer exuberance of a triangular vase by Ken Matsuzaki, covered in flaring plumes of white shino glaze, peeling away in all directions as it rose. What was that if not Twenty First Century Baroque? I had to handle it, turn it, see how its gestures followed through. Triangulate it. Meanwhile the same master potter was showing a plain, liver-red urn, as rotund and muscled as a lily bulb, a pot that for its form alone demanded to be held aloft and cherished like some funerary vessel.
There will always be pots I wish I had bought. Unfortunately, this was one that got away. Actually, they both were. But I would not remember them half so well had I not picked them up, turned them over and around and looked at them again, after half an hour. If I had not stopped on the mountainside.
Stephen Anderton has written on gardens in the Times for over 33 years. A degree in Classics and Drama led to a career as a professional gardener, concluding as National Gardens Manager for English Heritage. His cabaret songs about gardening were described in the Times as ‘to gardens, what Private Eye is to politics.’ His many books include a biography of Christopher Lloyd. He now lectures worldwide. His own garden in the Black Mountains is visited by specialist tours. Ceramics have been a fascination for over thirty years.
