General discussion on originality

hi, I do feel that the golden age of the artist potter has now gone, its all been done and i think it very unlikely that any new potters can break through with anything original .We all mainly collect named  potters from the past indeed some of the items we collect are now bordering on the antique, most of  the original artists are now  dead ,retired or found pottery to restrictive and have moved on to  sculpture ,the remaining few working  such as lee, fritsch, britton etc have already made their names and have their collectors .New potters seem to rely heavily on novelty or copies of the past .

You could argue that many of the artist potters of the 20th Century were just copying older work and what is happening now is just a progression.

I can understand that it is difficult for people of our age group to not come to such conclusions but there is a growing band of younger collectors out there now and artist potters that don't have the old references that we do. For them the new work will seem original and exciting just as it did for me when I came across studio pottery for the first time.

You are quite correct about the oatmeal glaze but the young collectors that buy (and don't buy) from me want that.

I remember years ago Richard Batterham saying in conversation with me that from his experience the real studio pottery collectors bought his tenmoku pots and the people that wanted things just to use went for the ash glazed work (I know that it's not quite oatmeal but it's the nearest that he made).

Today the young collectors seem to dislike tenmoku, with few even considering it as a possibility.

hi studio , firstly thanks for putting me right on my salgltaze/raku blunder ,chemistry has never been a strong point of mine ,I had little interest in in studio pottery until i started looking at coper pieces in auction and this excited me to look further, I have little interest in leach and his kind with their archaic folk type pottery and i think new younger collectors feel the same ,they want modernism for want of better word. I have only spoken to a couple of younger collectors but they are also not interested in what is being produced today and hanker after the more established potters. I guess galleries will still be still be trying to promote new blood with varying degrees of success .

My introduction to studio pottery/ceramics is a little different to yours but began in 1988 when I bought my first piece. At the time I was a part time antiques/collectable dealer and continued to sell other things and other pottery until I took over the Harlequin Gallery in 1999. From the beginning it would be fair to say that my interest was largely in work in the Anglo-Oriental tradition and developed along those lines. However, for the 10 years that I staged monthly exhibitions of largely new work at the Harlequin I did show work not in that tradition (the person that had more exhibitions with me than anyone else was Alan Wallwork). I also showed paintings and sculpture too on occasions.
From 2009 I have sold largely previously owned studio pottery/ceramics, both functional and sculptural, to customers that in most cases had been with me from the early days. These had become fewer over the years due to death, mobility problems and downsizing/stopping collecting. This was not a problem, as I did not need to sell that much, and I filled the rest of my time organising events locally with a small voluntary group that I am part of. Then Covid arrived on the scene and everything locally stopped.
After selling a few items online in the first month or so from my website and posting them, I decided to fill in my time by attempting to sell ceramics again. I did this by joining Instagram, which has proved to be the only social media platform that has worked as an advertising tool for me. It has meant that I have meet collectors from around the UK and further afield from various ages groups and have sold more items in the last year than I have since I stopped monthly exhibitions in 2009.

Having “met” a wider age group of buyers that perhaps I ever have, what has surprised me is that most of the younger generation appear to be interested in functional ware in dull matt light colours and lacking real sculptural form. With all such statements it is going to be a generalisation, but I think that it is true, and it is certainly something being pushed the media and influencers over recent years. They push things as being hand-made and showing that they are, which often means not well thrown or constructed. I have had no indications that many of them have much interest in sculptural work, as all of that has gone to older collectors by which I mean around 50 or above.

hi, I think i was probably a bit hard on old leach but i do wonder if he had had brought shoji to bogner or blackpool instead of st ives his story would have a bit less romance attached. I am now retired but in the past i have been a dealer mainly in 17th and 18th english pottery and delft but my personal interests are horology and post war british art and i now include studio pottery from this period. To be honest i don't see to many younger people at exhibitions .I hope you are right and the interest in art in general carries on to the younger generation but know my own offspring have little interest in 'stuff' as they call it and they are now in their 40s.

To the practical side. Art often reflects society.    The boom in pottery in the 60's and 70's  largely comes from the baby boomer generation, and the feeling of hope and renewal that emerged in a generation that had not lived through the exigencies of War. Plus the large expansion of Art colleges in the late 60's. People got married younger. It was also a lot easier to get on to the housing market. You have got to have a sense of permanence to start collecting stuff like Pottery.
          Whereas nowadays society has changed, and with it, collecting habits.

Yet Plus ca change. We started collecting pottery in the early 90's, living in South Devon. Quite near us we were fortunate to have the Devon Guild at Bovey Tracey and the Dartington complex which had a very good studio pottery gallery. Devon had a whole host of excellent studio potters and Cornwall was at hand. So we had a bounty of choice.
A few weeks ago we had to return to South Devon due to a family funeral. We took the opportunity for a brief look at old times. The Dartington complex was no longer there. But the Devon Guild at Bovey Tracey had just re-opened. Oh what a joy it was to look around it again! A still superb collection of pottery and craft roused the heart strings, from the very sombre mood my wife and I were in.
Its a lovely situation. In an Old Mill by the edge of a stream, in a village on the edge of Dartmoor with the Devon Tors as a distant background. It was gorgeous!
A footnote. They had a gorgeous display of puppets and puppetry. Pride of place was given to the Original Muffin The Mule puppet from the BBC early children's series. Seeing that just about the Icing on the cake of that visit!

I digress

Well if it's puppets you like Philpot them a friend of mine is an International Marionet and lives in the South of France. It's pretty wild stuff and some of the puppets are big! They did a play based on Alfred Jarry, who would get pissed off his head on Absinth and ride his bike through the streets of Paris whilst firing his pistol - he died aged 34

In his final years, he was a legendary and heroic figure to some of the young writers and artists in Paris. Guillaume Apollinaire, André Salmon and Max Jacob sought him out in his truncated apartment. Pablo Picasso was fascinated with Jarry.[8] After Jarry's death Picasso acquired his revolver and wore it on his nocturnal expeditions in Paris. He later bought many of his manuscripts as well as executing a fine drawing of him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Jarry

https://vimeo.com/buchingersboot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkAE28lHY-U

hi, a beautiful part of the country ,we get similar feelings when we go back to st ives in cornwall, we had once thought of moving there but life got in the way .We first went there in the late 70s and fell in love with the place, we still visit most years and while it has changed a little it is a great to be there. We were regular visitors to the new craftsman gallery, they used to have good stuff then , we never collected studio pottery then but did buy a few pieces by potters like mary rich, bedding and corser, it was paintings that mainly interested us. Since the building of the tate gallery it has come a bit more commercial but for the better i think .No sightings of muffin the mule i'm afraid but beautiful views across the beach from the cafe at the top of the tate building.