Scorched Earth: 100 Years of Southern African Potteries by Wendy Gers (review)

Scorched Earth is an account of potteries operating in southern Africa during the twentieth century. With this book, Wendy Gers offers a survey of thirty-two small-to-medium sized potteries that engaged in serial production of a variety of domestic and commercial wares. Each chapter is devoted to one pottery and includes a brief history, types of materials and techniques employed, and an account of the people involved in its history and operation. Gers is an independent curator and art historian who specializes in ceramics. She is also a former curator at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum, a founding coordinator of an international ceramics research laboratory for the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Arts (ENSA) Limoges, France, and a research associate at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Gers has curated several exhibitions, including the First Central China International Ceramics Biennale at the Henan Museum (December 2016–March 2017), and Terra-Nova, Taiwan Ceramics Biennale at the Yingge Museum, Taipei (May–November 2014).

The book is first and foremost an invaluable reference text. It succeeds in concentrating hundreds of disparate sources into a clear and highly accessible text. The book is based on extensive field research in an academic territory with very few wide-ranging and structured sources of information, a project that demands locating and gleaning knowledge from a multitude of publications, interviews, and private collections. The reward for this labor is a text that has all the potential to become a central reference point, sparking interest in the field, and enabling and spurring further research. Scorched Earth takes on this challenge consciously and, with a sense of responsibility, each pottery's story is told with analysis of its significance, but without judgment as to its importance within the canons of modern art.

As Gers states from the onset, apart from a few well-known and appreciated potteries (located in Europe, East Asia, and North America), there is very little academic or public attention paid to serially produced pottery. The dedication of a book of almost encyclopedic magnitude to such a subject means challenging the conventions of modern art that brought about this sort of disregard. Scorched Earth offers a "leveled out" picture, in which conventional hierarchies are erased. Its focus is on a marginalized form of artistic creation—production potteries, in a geographical region hardly recognized before as important to the history of this field. The book examines its subject with a clearly democratic and nonbiased approach, which extends to the treatment of its entire body of knowledge. The author includes potteries with artistic intentions and a long list of exhibitions, alongside potteries with more commercial intentions and also those that developed out of social projects. The various types of ceramic wares these producers made are all mentioned and illustrated equally, from the highbrow tableware and crockery, decorative nonfunctional wares and hand-painted vases, to the cheapest tourist souvenirs, tiles, and storage jars. All are included, researched, and listed with care. This attitude extends further into the stories of the people involved in the potteries, as a section of individual biographies of staff appears within the text devoted to each operation. Decorator, potter, founder, or designer, black or white, temporary or permanent, all (research permitting) are mentioned and elaborated on according to their contribution to the oeuvre of the specific pottery.

Serial production is a form of artistic expression that seeps into daily life and is experienced firsthand with little mediation. Crockery, souvenirs, painted tiles, and various decorated wares are all part of our lives, objects we come into contact with on a regular basis, usually without too much consideration. Their stories, and the stories of those who have conceived and made them, constitute a people's history and a document of local identity. During the late nineteenth and most of the twentieth century, there was a pocket of time when it was feasible to maintain small-scale, local modes of serial...