Professor Simon Olding, Director of the Crafts Study Centre

The Crafts Study Centre, pre Covid, had planned to open an exhibition in the Tanner Gallery in August focusing on the exceptional collections and archives of Bernard and Janet Leach in our care. This was intended to support the fine programme put together by The Leach Pottery in St Ives to celebrate the centenary of the founding of the pottery by Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada. There are still, however, many activities promoted on line by the Leach Pottery for its Leach 100 programme.

We are still hoping that our exhibition may be open to the public during 2020, and alongside the show we are working on a book which will bring new archives to light, and shed new insights in to the collections of Leach and Hamada as well as Leach’s long trip to Japan in 1934-35.

As a taster of these hopeful plans at the CSC, we present an essay and a short film. The essay, on Leach’s ceramic collections, was published and commissioned by the Mingei Magazine, the Japan Folk Craft Association for their special centenary edition in July and is reproduced with their kind permission.

Bernard Leach - A life of collecting 1.jpg

Bernard Leach - A life of collecting 2.jpg

The Crafts Study Centre exhibition will focus on collections and archives that have been added since the CSC relocated to Farnham in the year 2000. Many of these collections have been added through very important gifts, for which we are immensely grateful. Key purchases by Trustees of the Crafts Study Centre have been often supported over time by the Heritage Lottery Fund (‘Collecting Cultures’ grant), Art Fund and the Arts Council England/Victoria and Albert Museum Purchase Grant Fund, and we acknowledge their important contributions to help secure important ceramics and archives, including, most recently, the remarkable Alan Bell archive which will be strongly featured in the exhibition and book.