Charlie Collier Exhibition Walkthrough - GOLDMARK

It will come as no surprise if you've been following our ceramics exhibitions here at the Goldmark Gallery that there is something of a generational change going on. In the last few years we have seen a number of veteran makers moving on from the craft. We've seen the passing of people like Phil Rogers, Richard Batterham. We've seen potters like Mike Dodd, Clive Bowen, Jim Malone, Sven Beyer give their final exhibitions as exhibiting makers here at Goldmark. So this debut exhibition by Charlie Collier does not just the youngest exhibitor ever to show here at Goldmark, it's also a chance to showcase what a new generation has to offer. The pots that you see around you in this show Charlie has been putting aside for the last few years. They're some of the best work that he's produced to date and though early in his early 30s I think you can see from the beautiful work around me that he has a fascinating future ahead of him. When I look at the pots around this show it's clear to see who Charlie's heroes have been. There is a great debt to Sven Beyer with whom he actually worked briefly at Kigbeer Studios in Devon, particularly in his wonderful Devon jugs, in the huge jar forms that you see downstairs in the gallery and up here in this space. There are elements of form taken from people like Clive Bowen, Mike Dodd and Richard Batterham who he met and spent some time with too. But I think it was the critic and writer T.S. Eliot who said that it's really the least interesting thing you can say about someone's art to simply point out the sources of inspiration that have gone in. The tradition or genre of pottery, the kind of style of work that Charlie is drawn to, this kind of leech continuity as it's often called, this conversation, the dialogue between East and West, this examination of Mingay folk style pottery is one that has long been cross-cultural. It has involved potters looking back thousands of years across continents and cultural dynasties, picking, choosing, selecting, plucking the different aspects and elements that they feel suit what they want to say about the world. It is a matter of selection and for me what's more important about a potter's work is what that selection says to us. How does it make us feel? What is the sensibility that's captured in those parts? When I look at Charlie's work there is real warmth to it, not just literal physical warmth in the colours, this wonderful earth and palette that he has, the glazes he's chosen, the wood-fired work that he has, but a warmth of spirit too. There is reverence not just for the material that he's working with but also for those that have come before him. I think most importantly there is a kind of kindness to his work too. When I pick up one of his Devon jugs I can feel that it is lightly thrown but not meanly thrown. It's a pot, in other words, that has you and me and its use in mind. Charlie's own relationship with clay and pottery I think started as a teenager where he sort of fell in love with the medium but it is grounded in two major sort of periods of work. The first was spending seven years at Jim Killings Witchford Pottery as a production thrower making large and small flower pots. It's there really that he had an incredible grounding in the rudiments of what running a pottery, what the physical demands of it would be. He then followed that with five years at Kickbeard Studios in Devon where he worked with the team and the wood-fired kiln that Sven had set up there a number of years before. It's those two periods of his life that have given him an incredible grounding in craftsmanship, in technical skill, things that are vitally important and difficult to come by in the world of pottery today. Evidence for that craft skill is clearly on display. These are pots that have been beautifully designed. They've been thought through both how they're going to be used but also how they sort of speak to each other. There's a kind of consistency, a continuity to the voice across this work and that's often the hardest thing for a young potter to develop. More importantly though, I think Charlie is aware that craft skill and technique are a means to an end. The printmaker Stanley Hayter used to say that technique is not a mechanical device for making better pictures or better things. It's a condition, it's a liberating condition. It's something that frees you, that allows your hand and your mind not to think about the intricacies of what you're doing but to be creative and imaginative. I am not a potter but I did play the piano for a number of years and if I can describe it this way, as a musician it's necessary to spend those many hours practicing your scales, going over the passages that are difficult in a piece of music. That's what trains the muscles in your hands and your fingers to move in a certain way, it gives you that dexterity. But when it comes to the important part, when it comes to playing the music, whether it's for an audience or just for yourself, your eyes might be looking at the sheet music in front of you but you're not reading the notes, you're not thinking about where your fingers are going. You're feeling the kind of swell and ebb of the phrase of music, you're feeling the sounds that are coming out of the instrument in an almost three-dimensional way. It's a feeling for form that I think is probably very similar to how production throwing gives you the technical skills as a potter to feel form as you're making, to have a very kind of deep and profound sense for what you're making rather than thinking about the very specifics of what your fingers and hands are doing at any moment. Having said all of that, there is obviously a great deal of technical know-how, of knowledge on display here in this exhibition. You only have to look at the way that Charlie has glazed these pots to see that. There's beautiful Shino glazes, Kaki and Tamoku. There are ash glazes where he started to use ash from the local orchard at Kigbir producing a really wonderful particular effect. And some of those ashes are actually responsible for the effect that you see in many of these pots, that wonderful light blue kind of optical effect you get in the glaze. It's a lovely addition to this very earthy palette. It's something lighter and sort of clean and fresh that goes alongside these very kind of grounded colours. For young potters out there, much of this information has never been more freely available. There has never been so much information online about glazing pots, about making, about wood fired processes. Much of this is more open to them than has ever been for any generation that came before. Paradoxically, I think it is probably harder now than it has ever been for a young potter to establish themselves, to find a studio space they can work with, to get used to a studio rhythm, a rhythm of practical pot making, to have the time and the patience and the self-belief to work through pottery. Pottery is a procedural art. It's one that's very slow. You're constantly fixing issues, solving problems. The pace at which you can make change in your work and you can explore ideas is very slow. A real career in pottery is many decades at the wheel, at the glaze buckets, at the kiln. So to see where Charlie has come at just his early 30s is really remarkable. What I think is most impressive about this exhibition of Charlie's, though, is that it demonstrates that he's not been in a rush to express himself and find that individual voice, that he's been happy to let the process take him there and to arrive at it by its own means. There's a wonderful essay that Michael Cardew wrote about this very subject. I'm going to read some of it because I think it applies quite aptly to Charlie's work. Cardew thought that to become a good professional potter meant preserving some of what he called the spark and the freshness, even some of the clumsiness coming from his probably amateur beginnings, always being drawn on irresistibly by glimpses of things that at the beginning you never thought would be within your range. Cardew was imagining the starting potter faced with the kind of onslaught of technical knowledge about materials and process that you have to acquire, and he imagined them resorting maybe to packet bought clays, to glazes, prefabricated kilns. These all have their place, he says, but in combination together when they're relied upon they can produce pots that are only partly yours. They won't be as good as they have a right to be if they're deprived of half of their personality by these shortcuts. A sensitive potter feeling that there is something missing will probably try to replace it by what I call a deliberately willed injection of personality, but it's a mistake because the something which is missing, call it character or personality or originality or whatever you prefer, is in fact a very mysterious and elusive thing which cannot be pinned down and captured by a direct assault. The only chance of catching it is by stalking it and taking it by surprise. You have to approach the mystery by an indirect road. It's a lovely encapsulation, I think, of the challenge that faces the potter at the start of this long journey, this long career. Looking around at these wonderful pots and seeing how accomplished Charlie already is, I have every confidence that he is going to become one of our greats.