Svend Bayer studio pottery

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Svend Bayer is Danish but spent much of his early life in Africa or at school in England.

After university he studied at the pottery of Michael Cardew at Wenford Bridge in Cornwall and then travelled widely in Japan, Korea and Southeast Asia to visit country potteries that produced large storage jars. He returned to England in 1975 and set up his studio at Sheepwash in North Devon.

His pottery is fired in a large wood-fired kiln.

On a visit to another pottery that had a wood-fired kiln, I chatted with the potter who had just had a firing and he wanted to apologise because something I had ordered would not be finished until the next firing. He had three apprentices so, when the kiln was loaded for a firing, it held pots by all four potters and from several months of work so the success or not of a firing was about the livelihood for four families. If a firing went badly then it was a disaster for four families. That tension but also the demands of the process itself meant that the kiln was packed with care and with the skill that comes with experience and the whole process had to be supervised through the days and the nights as the kiln was brought up to temperature and then as the kiln cooled before it was unloaded.

But even in the very best studios accidents happen and the web site for Svend Bayer has an account and photographs by Brigitte Colleaux about a firing disaster at the kiln at Kingbeare in April 2019.

Part of the character of finished pots is that ash, impurities in the clay or different effects of the heat on single pot because that heat varies in intensity across the kiln are all essential to both the quality and the character of ceramics from a wood-fired kiln but when there is a problem that can escalate into a disaster

What is so incredible - as you use ceramic tableware like this - is that you can see and feel the way that the potter worked the malleable clay to, for example, pull out and down and smooth into place with a thumb a handle, and then how that action, that requires the coordination of hand and eye and experience, is then fixed and can be seen by all after the pot is fired and for as long as that piece is still used and appreciated.

This work by Svend Bayer is studio pottery of the very highest quality and is the work of a master craftsman and yet it is also functional pottery that is made to be used and, in being used, the bowls and cups and jars enhance day-to-day life in a way that is difficult to measure or quantify.

The Japanese or Korean style jar with four small handles, shown here, sits on the side in my kitchen because it is the perfect size and height to hold all the spatulas and ladles and cooking spoons I need so that means it is used every day.

The small jar with a lid sits alongside the hob and holds cooking salt.

I swear that the bowls, shown here, when they are full of soup, really do make that soup taste better because the bowls make a simple meal of soup and fresh bread feel special.

And, surely, isn’t that what good craftsmanship and good design is really about?

Buying good ceramic tablewares is one simple way towards sustainability because it should be the antidote to our cavalier attitudes to consumerism … the swipe/like/buy/get bore/discard/buy something new world of this century.

These bowls and the casserole were not particularly cheap but nor were they horrendously expensive but, more than forty years after buying them, I still enjoy using them and, every time I use them, they really do make life feel better.

Svend Bayer

 

Store Krukker / Large Pots at Designmuseum Danmark

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Designmuseum Danmark has just opened a new display in one of the large side galleries with 70 ceramic vessels from their own collection and described simply as large pots.

They vary in period and in country of origin but most are by Danish potters and artists and most are from the late 19th century onwards although there are also older ceramic vessels from Japan, Korea and China and work from Spain, France and England … all countries with strong but distinct ceramic traditions.

Some of the pieces are clearly storage jars - so utilitarian - but there are also sophisticated decorative vessels and some fine studio pottery.

The size of some of these pots is amazing and the selection of ceramics shown here provides an amazing opportunity to see how the technical skill of the potter; the form or shape of the pot; the choice of smooth, perfect and highly finished surfaces or the decision to leave a more natural finish determined by the character of the clay and the use or not of decoration, incised or in relief; the types of glaze; any use of texture or a preference for a smooth finish or high shine or matt surface and of course the final colour or colours produce works of incredibly diverse styles.

Designmuseum Danmark

 
 

Kähler at CHART Design Fair August 2019

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The Kåhler pottery was founded by Joachim Christian Hermann Kähler in 1839 and this exhibition at Den Frie - for the CHART Design Fair - is in part to mark their 180th anniversary. 

Initially, Kähler produced stoves and cooking pots and kitchenwares. Two sons - Hermann A Kähler and his younger brother Carl Frederik Kähler - took over the factory in 1872. After a fire in 1875, a new factory was established and the company began producing finer ceramics, particularly vases, and began working with ceramic artists including H Brendekilde, L A Ring and Carl Lund and later Karl Hansen Reistrup and then Svend Hammershøi who became the artistic director of the company. 

Kähler experimented with shapes, glazes - particularly a hallmark deep red lustre - and with decorative techniques of painting by hand.

The exhibition here showed a range of their pieces through the history of the factory that show how, as a commercial company, they had to respond to changes of fashion but also, by employing well-established and talented artists, they could also set certain styles. 

Plaster casts for slip-pouring moulded, rather than thrown, pieces and sample strips of glaze colours gave some insight into the technical aspects of the high-quality ceramics.

In 1974 the factory was sold to Næstved municipality and then passed through a number of owners including Holmegaard but since 2018 has been part of the Rosendahl Group.

Kåhler

Lotte Westphael at the Frue Plads craft market

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The ceramicist Lotte Westphael trained at Kolding and now has her studio in Silkeborg.

Her distinctive and elegant pieces illustrate several major points about design and the design process that have been discussed on this site but are well worth repeating.

These are slabs pots but not the normal style of slab pots that immediately spring to mind. Raising the sides of a vessel by pinching the clay and pulling it upwards or by forming the sides with thin rolls of clay then smoothed together or forming a flat single sheet of clay and then raising it around a flat and usually circular base … making a slab pot … as techniques predate moulding or throwing pieces on a potters wheel. It would be wrong to see such pots as crude or basic and in skilled hands those techniques can be used to make thin and well-shaped and well-finished pots but here the clay is a fine porcelain body in a mixture or recipe that Lotte has developed for this phase of her work and the finished work is an incredibly refined and elegant slab pot.  And phase is the right word because on the stall at the craft market it was possible to see several pieces that reflected stages in more than three years of development.

What makes the finished ceramics so elegant and so astonishing is that the partly-dried sheets of clay for the sides are slashed and the strips of darker clay inserted and the sides rolled thinner again so that the design is actually not applied as it might appear to be but is an integral part of the material of the piece. The tall sides are then built up by butting together thinner strips and, as any potter will tell you, the most difficult part and the most vulnerable part likely to be revealed in the firing is any joins. Here the join also has to be precise as the style of the finished work has an exacting graphic quality. The strips added to each other reminded me of ikat and textiles where strips or woven ribbons are sewn together to form a larger piece. When I suggest that, Lotte Westphael smiled and said that actually she has studied in Japan and suddenly it was obvious that the finished works do have that fascinating design aesthetic that can be seen independently and with clear but subtle differences in Denmark and in Japan. The colour palette of the finished works could be typically Danish or, on the other hand, typically Japanese.

What these ceramic works show so clearly is a complicated relationship between the interests and the evolving style of the artist; a design concept that evolves and develops over a sequence of works and designs for pieces that rely on the confidence to push both the material and the techniques used in new directions or to new boundaries or limits. To use phrases like confidence or courage when talking about design might seem odd to someone who does not design or does not make but actually that sense of focus combined with the determination to realise an idea is at the core of much new design work. Courage? Well yes. For most potters the works they sell are their only income. So safer to stick with making what people have bought before. Confidence? Well yes because, for instance here, the clay in the early stages of the production is not self supporting so the sides are set out around a former but as the clay dries it shrinks so remove it too soon and the piece collapses or try to remove the former too late and it won’t come out. Hours of work can be lost.

A kiln will take days and days of work in a single firing. Get that firing wrong and that time and that potential income is lost. Few potters would talk about those aspects of their work to a customer … particularly in the environment of the craft market … but this clearly is a good example of one of those points where design skills, technical skills, the understanding of what the materials can or cannot do and the imagination to try and realise new ideas all come together.

 

Lotte Westphael, Anedalvej 1b, Silkeborg