Roger Michell
Studio pottery 2005 : a brief description of background
In
2005 I moved my studio to France, I had been working in, and through the
public arts sector and teaching at Falmouth Art College. This was having
an effect on my approach to what was fondly called my 'own work'.
Falmouth because it couldn't afford to provide sufficient skilled tutors
at a high level was busily de-skilling the crafts programme and substituting
a crazed ( i should have been good at that) undisciplined conceptual/theoretical
approach. This was cannily obscured by the assumption that academic degrees
were somehow more intellectually exacting than making a tea pot. Although
self evidently not true some inherited notion of quality still hung to
the academic.
The public arts sector, health was the one I worked in, was brought to the forefront of the state project in a desperate (political) attempt to paper over the terminal structural cracks in a failing NHS or other declining sector (economic regeneration). The healthcare professionals chose an 'all art is subjective" argument merrily dismissing 2000 years of critical dialogue and substituting shopping... but they were pretty well at the end of their tethers. It has to be said it was a very stupid idea to give them arts money to spend.
As you can see this engagement in the state delivery of benefit to the greater number fell short of my idealistic ambition to contribute to a better world.
So brushing myself down I returned to the world of 'making'
I started useing porcelain, firing at 1240 I was able to adapt my high temperature eathenware glazes, useing mild reduction I kept the freshness, increased the delicacy and got a hard, lovely quality porcelain. It took several firings in a very un-even kiln, the bottom can fire 40 degrees cooler than the top.
Reconsidering my approach I rejected all the 'clever' concepts... most especially the need to seen to be so. Returning to simple timeless challenges.
The last fourty years has seen the strongest development and energy in Ceramics, (I always thought of myself as a potter not ceramicist) and I suspect the period will be looked back upon with great interest especially by collectors. The confidence and progress the sector should have had was undermined by the leaders and opinion formers seeking re-classification as 'artists'. I am still puzzled as to what this is about. Never the less the vigour and quality of this period is undeniable. It is possibly now over? leaving academics, collecters and future generations of potters to sift through and evaluate it. It saw radical changes in what may look rather more like a cult than an art movement with dogmatic schisms and authoritarian statements.
But gazing into the future is fraught with difficulties, probably the only certainty is that it will be got wrong. or more specifically, I will get it wrong so for the time being at least I will desist.