A Potter’s Book

"Bernard Leach was the most significant 20th century potter. He was the person who articulated why pottery mattered. He did it through his evocation of the value of Eastern pottery, and his advocacy and evangelism for the handmade pot. He was English but grew up in Japan, and he “got” Japanese pottery earlier than anyone else. He came back to St Ives in Cornwall [in Britain] in 1919 and set up a pottery studio. He can be regarded as the father of the studio pottery movement. As a young man, I wrote a debunking book about Leach for the Tate gallery. It was a critique of the myth of Leach more than a critique of Leach himself. But A Potter’s Book remains incredibly important because of its ability to allow any reader who picks it up to understand the excitement and energy of the making of pots. You pick it up, and you get it. He articulates with great energy why pots are interesting things to have in your hand, and to make. That’s a pretty extraordinary thing to be able to do. It works as a manifesto and as a handbook simultaneously, which is remarkable. And the book itself remains remarkable – it’s over 70 years since it was first published, but it still has that buzz to it. It does act as a practical guide. It tells you what to do with clay, what a glaze is and how to build a kiln. But it’s also a manual on aesthetics. It has his philosophy of why pots matter. And it has a kind of canon of his favourite ceramic objects scattered through it. You can pick it up and “get” Leach – why he makes things, how he makes them, what to look at and why they’re worth looking at. So it’s both a philosophical guide and a manual all in one. Absolutely. He was an Edwardian gentleman at large in Japan. There’s nothing wrong with that at all, but throughout his life he gave the impression that he’d seen truly into the heart of Japan and the Oriental man, and come back to the West bearing the gift of knowledge of the Orient. That was absolutely bogus. I tried to write something which said why he mattered, but also that he was a big enough man and a significant enough figure in the art world to bear a bit of truth telling as well."