Guy Wolff: Master Potter in the Garden

1. Guy Wolff: Master Potter

Guy Wolff Chapter one Master Potter Wolff says it’s “the bones of a pot that matter.” When he looks at a piece he likes, most often vintage country pottery, he says he is “interested in the architectural decisions the potter made to get the clay to move.” He tries to visualize how “to get from point A to point B in the least moves.” It is his notion of the least moves that is one of the defining principles of his work, and what gives his pots their energy. This is counterintuitive. We think of modern craftspeople as taking their time, of handwork by definition being slow work. But pottery, Wolff believes, is different. He is not alone in this. Staubach_GW_Finalpgs.indd 5 4/26/13 10:55 AM 6 Guy Wolff “Unlike other mass-produced art,hand-thrown pots seem to look better the faster they are turned out,”John Windsor wrote for the Sunday Independent in 1995.“The potter’s skill improves with practice—yet there is no time for pretentiousness . Hence the charm of English country pottery made for cooking, baking, brewing, storing, growing seedlings, or feeding chickens.”1 Windsor was writing about a collection of early English country pottery that had recently come onto the market and explaining to his urban readers why these simple pots from the past resonated with modern cooks. These are the pots that Wolff admires. A measure of his achievement is that Windsor’s words could equally describe the appeal of Wolff ’s wares.Quickly and robustly thrown, in multiples, his pots, like the old-time pots, touch us. Among the offerings at that auction were a few pots made by one of Wolff ’s personal heroes, Isaac Button, the“last true English country potter.”Wolff says he loves to watch the black-and-white video that the photographer/filmmaker John Anderson made of Button in 1965, four years before Button’s death at 66. “It’s one of my favorites,” Wolff smiles. “It’s a window into the last breath of preindustrial pottery.” Button worked at Soil Hill, which had been a pottery since 1780 when Jonathan Catherall set it up. By 1884, Button’s grandfather was there, and later his father. At one time thirteen potters made wares to fill the big coal-fired kiln, but in the last decades Button worked alone, doing everything himself. He dug and processed the clays, mixed slip, threw, glazed, and fired alone. It was hard physical work. He made cider jars, horticultural wares, jugs, cups, milk pans and other items for the farm and kitchen. In the film, which Wolff never tires of watching, you see him with a bib apron tied on over his jacket, a pipe in his mouth,a cravat at his neck,as he deftly throws cup after cup,seemingly without effort.Making a tall jar,he smiles to himself when it is done.“In a day,”Windsor wrote,“he could turn a ton of clay into pots. I timed him as he threw a lump of clay on to the wheel, pulled it high, then cut it off with wire: 22 seconds. In an hour, he could turn out 120 pots. In a day, 1,200.”2 Wolff is working in a different era but his skills at the wheel rival Button’s. “When you are working in any medium you have to understand the attributes of the material and understand what it is meant to do,” he says.“You have to have a reverence for the material.”With clay, he explains,“it is motion and compression ,just as with music it is sound and silence,or photography: light and dark.” Wolff ’s wheels are electric,high-end ShimpoWhispers made in Japan.When throwing, he runs his wheel at a fast speed and has both the wheel and his seat Staubach_GW_Finalpgs.indd 6 4/26/13 10:55 AM 7 Master Potter elevated, much like a kick wheel. He has built himself a simple wooden stool, not to sit on but to lean against. For big pots, he stands on cement blocks so that he can work over the wheelhead and reach his arm all the way down into the bottom interior of the pot. Wolff can easily throw fifty pounds of clay into a tall arm’s-length jar. Certainly he is not the only potter with this skill, but he does it...