Now in his 80th year, Clive Bowen ranks as the finest slipware potter working in Britain, feted in Japan and collected internationally. Alun Graves, senior curator at the V&A, takes stock of a career spanning over 50 years.
For more than fifty years, Clive Bowen has made slipware at his pottery near Shebbear in north Devon. Arriving there in 1971, he converted the dilapidated buildings of a former small-holding into a pottery workshop and showroom, and built his first small kiln. Five years on, things were going well enough for him to build a substantial new wood-fired kiln, and to take on a few assistants. Increasingly finding his artistic voice, his work became recognisably his own. Fast forward through the better part of five decades, and Bowen shows little sign of slowing down. When I visit him in June 2023 – a few months after his 80th birthday – he tells me has made 800 pots so far this year, and is working towards major shows in Japan and England.
Bowen is part of what we can increasingly see as a truly great generation of potters of the later 20th and 21st centuries, whose numbers include Richard Batterham and Bowen’s friend and fellow-Devon potter, Svend Bayer. A generation connected still with the early-20th century pioneers – Batterham had trained with Bernard Leach, Bayer with Michael Cardew, Bowen with Bernard’s son Michael Leach – but who made their careers at a different cultural moment, the freer and less constrained years of the 1960s and 70s. Before arriving at pottery, Bowen had first trained as a painter at the art school of his home city of Cardiff. Indeed, he has continued to paint, his work informed by the pop art movement of the 1960s – of David Hockney, Peter Blake and Joe Tilson – a reminder of Bowen’s engagement with the art of his time. An apprenticeship with Michael Leach nevertheless set Bowen on a different trajectory, and the slipware of north Devon – where he had made his home – offered a new medium to explore. The rich pottery heritage of the region, of Bideford and Barnstaple, is well-known, a thriving local industry having emerged in the 17th century, built on the ready availability of high-quality local clays and transport links that took north Devon wares as far afield as North America. Yet to suggest Bowen sits within this tradition is perhaps to miss the point. After all, people take actions – including consciously borrowing from history – according to contemporary circumstances. Rather than retrospectively imagining a lineage, it is perhaps more compelling to consider why, in the later 1960s and 70s, it became so potent to reinvent and reimagine the cultural forms of the vernacular past. In those remarkable decades, confronted by an increasingly technocratic society, the counter-cultural desire to find more genuine and empowered ways of living and being became strident. And as the title (borrowed for this text) of Shirley Collins and Davy Graham’s landmark 1964 album proposes, new possibilities might emerge through the harnessing of traditional forms, and the steering of them in new directions. For Bowen, the lively slipware of north Devon, with its compelling inducement to be lived with and used, perhaps offered a more meaningful future. Progression, not retreat.
Michael Cardew, with whom Bowen spent a formative period working as an occasional assistant in the years following his apprenticeship, once famously described himself as a ‘mud and water man’. ‘Potters’ he said, ‘are two kinds. There’s the mud and water potters who like making pots and messing about with clay, and there’s the potters who love to fire kilns.’ For Cardew at least, firing was a ‘terrible bore’, done ‘only out of a sense of duty’. By the time he made these comments – the occasion being his return to Nigeria in 1973 to revisit the Pottery Training Centre he had established there, for the purposes of a documentary film made by Alister Hallum – Cardew was an advocate of stoneware, and had worked in the material for more than two decades. Yet it is hard, at least to some degree, not to equate ‘mud and water’ with the joys of slip-decorated earthenware, and ‘fire’ with those of reduction stoneware, in which the transformative effects of the kiln are intrinsic to the qualities of the finished work. In slipware, meanwhile, the trace of the raw materials is never far away. It is a medium of refreshing and remarkable directness, and with absolute economy of means. A single red earthenware clay body used in combination with liquid clay ‘slip’ in white, red, dark brown, or occasionally other colours, together with a similarly restricted choice of partially-coloured transparent glazes, provides a concise palette that nevertheless offers seemingly endless possibilities. The sense of the movement of the potter’s hand in the gestural mark-making of slipware decoration is palpable. It remains there in front of you, captured and preserved for all time. In Bowen’s case, decoration is achieved through the long-established means of incising with a tool or combing with the fingers through a contrasting layer of clay slip, or by trailing lines of coloured slip onto the pot’s surface. Often though, his ‘trailed’ lines are rather more energetically squirted, in a fast and loose variation of the technique.
Bowen, like Cardew, seems absolutely a ‘mud and water potter’. Certainly, the wood-firing of his pots imparts warmth and character, bringing depth to their surfaces, together with a glinting brilliance that connects you – via the pot – to whatever light source there might be. But the real joy in Bowen’s work comes more from its making, from the rising skyward lift of his thrown forms, with jugs of medieval form standing loftily, even when their stature is small, and jars swelling fecundly. Giant thrown dishes meanwhile seem less to be exercises in bravado and more like acts of extraordinary generosity. And then there is the decoration itself. Unlike the pots of his stoneware-potter contemporaries, which often have a quality of stillness – one thinks of the stillness of the Chinese jar of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets that might stand as their archetype – the jars and jugs and dishes of Clive Bowen wriggle energetically. Everything is in motion, nothing still. Turn a moment, we might think, and the fish caught mid leap will have splashed noisily back into the water.
This watery spirit, this affinity with the flora and fauna of rivers, lakes and sea, is a deep-rooted and pervasive aspect of slipware. Writing in the fledgling journal Pottery Quarterly in 1956, in a piece entitled ‘Sub Aqua’, the slipware potter John Shelly – then of the Bath Pottery – observed: ‘Slip is a liquid decoration on a liquid background, hence watery subjects look better in this medium than those from dry land. The eternal fish, of course; and seaweed looks better than garden weeds. Turtles with flippers rather than the horny-legged tortoise. Frogspawn, the markings on shells, indeed anything under water is good material for this fluid and most spontaneous form of decoration.’ Bowen takes full advantage of this in his own distinct repertoire of motifs: seaweed, fish (‘of course’), and of particular delight, a shrimp with magnificent looping whiskers. Horizontal undulating lines meanwhile call to mind the rippling surface of wind-crossed water. Even his more gestural, abstract forms of mark-making retain this watery sense, appearing – in particular on plates and dishes – as if an aerial view of some ever-shifting estuarine landscape. Indeed, his pots are themselves a kind of water-land: their earth drained then flooded, silt accumulating, rivulets flowing, channels cut; liquidity from which springs life.
This response, this reimagining of a tradition, is nonetheless rooted – or perhaps anchored – to its place. Shebbear Pottery, which lies a mile and a half north of the village from which it takes its name, is nestled in the rolling farmland of north Devon. It is a land of narrow lanes and thick hedges, a corner of the world where the sea never feels that far away, with an oceanic climate and high rainfall. A mile south-west of the pottery, the River Torridge follows a meandering course, looping its way towards Bideford and the Torridge Estuary, and its meeting point with the River Taw. A short distance upstream from there lies Yelland – where Bowen served his apprenticeship with Michael Leach – and Fremington, whose pottery was the inspiration for Cardew’s pre-war slipware, which itself provides the closest model for Bowen’s own. West of Bideford meanwhile lies the dramatic, rocky coastline of the Hartland peninsula, with its granite cliffs and views to Lundy island. It is a landscape in which Bowen’s slipware – homely yet elemental – makes complete sense. A meeting place of earth and water, land and sea.
Alun Graves, 2024, senior curator at the V&A