A Ceramic History by Edmund de Waal

1. Clay and Process
2. Pioneering Definitions 1900-1940 The Studio Pot
3. European Influences: Lucie Rie and Hans Coper
4. Art Schools: A New Ceramics?
5. Teachers: Who Taught You Then?
6. Altogether Elsewhere: Cultural Diversity and the Studio Pot
7. Painterly Surfaces?
8. Does it Pour? Function in Studio Pottery
9. Necessary Pots? Unnecessary Pots?

5. Teachers: Who Taught You Then?

The first part of any potters' statement about themselves usually includes where they learnt to make pots . It is vital information, often intriguing and sometimes baffling. Did they go to Art College? Where and when? Were they apprenticed? Did they learn in a patchwork of other ways? Self-taught? The manner that potters learn helps us to understand how studio pottery as a movement has grown into what it is now. How potters are taught now tells us about the possibilities for the future, too.

Art Schools, and later Art Colleges, have proved to be a vital part of the growth of studio ceramics. Courses have proliferated: some have become famous for particular kinds of work at particular times. Examples, other than the Central School of the 50s, are Harrow Art College in the 1960s and Camberwell Art College in the 1970s. The history of contemporary studio pottery is a network of complex relationships of where people learnt how to make pots, of charismatic teachers, of differing ways of approaching the making of pots.

From the early 1920s Leach had a succession of both apprentices (potters who stayed with him for a lengthy period like William Marshall (1923-) who joined in 1938 and left in 1977) and students who stayed for a few months or a few years. Michael Cardew had a similar approach to training. At Winchcombe in the 1930s he taught Ray Finch (1914-) who later went on to take over the pottery and train many other potters. Cardews' influence is discernible in the work still being made at Winchcombe today. Cardew also trained such key contemporary potters as Svend Bayer (1946-) who has taken the wide-bellied jug form that Cardew was so fond of and transformed into his own, and Rupert Spira (1960-) who has moved away from a Cardew-esque use of decoration towards a more personal austere and minimal style. One possible lesson is that strong influential teachers like Cardew was do not have to have derivative followers. Apprenticeship is not a common way of learning now. It can have many strong salient features: the emphasis on learning a craft skill and how a workshop runs can lead to confident practitioners. There can also be concomitant problems from learning from only one person, of internalising a particular way of making and not becoming aware of other ways of working.

There have been significant attempts to integrate the kinds of learning experience that occurs in a workshop within an Art College structure. The most impressive of these was the foundation of a pottery course at Harrow in 1963 by Michael Casson (1925-) and Victor Margrie (1929-). Casson and Margrie led a course that included not only the teaching of making skills, but also how to build kilns and wheels, find raw materials and so on. It was innovative in that it presupposed that any motivated student could be equipped to start their own workshop. Many of the best production-throwing domestic ware potteries of the 60s and 70s owed their existence to this course. In the 1980s a different kind of learning environment was established at the Dartington Pottery. This was originally set up by Peter Starkey in 1976 to provide one or two year training courses. In 1984 the pottery was bought out and Janice Tchalenko (1942-) was asked to redesign the forms and decorative palette, which she did with great brio. The colours of the pots made at Dartington are amongst the most vivacious seen in British ceramics since the Art Deco period. As a training for potters it remains another model for how it is possible to learn in a commercial context.