Alison Britton, Chair of Trustees for the Crafts Study Centre

A powerful clay figure of an abstracted spiky woman by Bryan Illsley has recently been added to our collection.  It is hand built from buff clay, gashed in places with a knife, and painted with splashes of white slip and metal oxides and a few of glaze. The head section is separate and rests inside the figure's 'neck', and the side loops are probably what feminise the figure, representing arms but with some suggestion of breasts.

It comes to the Crafts Study Centre as a gift from the extensive art holdings of the American collector Patricia Barnes, who had a big house in London, and another in Evanston, Illinois. She collected things across many fields but ceramics and painting figured most strongly.  

In Bryan Illsley's prolific work she could find both, and bought from him enthusiastically through several decades. In whatever medium you see his work it is always very recognisable, strikingly his. 

After an early apprenticeship with a stone mason – he was 14 – Illsley through his long career has made work out of almost every material that came to hand. Paintings, wooden sculpture, forged metal sculpture from agricultural left overs, hand-made books. 'In all forms the work is about abstraction. The business of approximating feeling with form, giving an indirect shape, or a visual gesture in the right direction, to complicated notions and experiences of life.'  

Moving to Cornwall in the early sixties after a period of illness, and living in St Ives, he learnt to make jewellery, and shared a workshop with Breon O'Casey from 1964 - 1982.  Clay was in his sights quite early - living with his family in a flat in St Ives, and needing to make ends meet, Illsley as a young man took a part time job for a few days a week at the Leach Pottery in St Ives from 1964-66.  He reclaimed and pugged the clay for the throwers and organised the packing shed for pots being sent out. Janet Leach clearly welcomed his presence for his personality as well as his labour, and wrote ' I often felt the clay mixing and packing department was the most creative area in the Pottery at times'. 

In this short introduction to the catalogue for his first major exhibition in London in 1984,  which took place while he was still living in Cornwall, she continued 'It was not unusual for those in the workshop to get low and depressed in the January/February period when everything was wet – clay, pots, clothes – and Bryan's period of work here at that time was a rare pleasure to me. He was enjoying the atmosphere of the pottery and the friendship of the potters. Bernard liked to talk at tea-breaks discussing the various aspects of crafts and craft movements. Bryan was usually the liveliest in the discussions.' And when he was in charge of reclaiming clay he also occasionally made something of the slops from the thrower's wheels, waiting in the trough to be put through the pugmill; or built a pyramid of the soft pugged clay cylinders. Some of the team saw it as malingering when he made a big sculpture of a naked woman in the bath with her husband scrubbing her back, and put a scrubbing brush in his hand. Janet found it extremely amusing. It was a workshop encounter that Bryan likes to re-tell. He also of course sneaked a few small clay works into the kilns.

Bryan moved to live in London in 1986. Tatjana Marsden had been buying his work since she was an MA silversmithing student at the RCA in the early 70s, visiting him in St Ives. His work was later often seen at the shop in the V&A run by the Crafts Council, which she managed for some years. To support his move to London she employed him for packing sold work, and his wife ran the office for a while, at the British Crafts Centre which Tatjana directed from 1983 to 1990. Bryan was often also an exhibitor there. 

I had first seen his paintings at Anthony Stokes art gallery in a back street in Covent Garden (there was still a more bohemian atmosphere there in the years after the vegetable market left the area in 1974). I borrowed two of his late 70s paintings from the gallery for my selection for 'The Makers Eye' exhibition at the Crafts Council in 1981.

My studio is a converted butchers shop in Stamford Hill in Hackney that a potter friend and I made into two studio spaces, and a kiln room behind, in 1986. At some point in the late eighties Bryan asked if he could come and make some clay work there, and I think that Hammerhead must have been one of the first pieces that I fired for him in 1989.  I suppose the loose top section of Hammerhead is to do with accommodating the height of my old kiln. Not long afterwards Bryan took on the run-down garage at the back of our workshop yard, and made it into a studio space. He has been there ever since, and in it he has made work covering most of his great span of material practice, except for forging metal, though he does do soldering. Painting and jewellery have been dominant, but also wooden sculpture, some in sheet metal, some in clay, and even a few lidded pots and cups. He also makes etchings at Paupers Press in Hackney.

Bryan had given me at the time a small sculpture Female Figure from the same 1989 batch of work, that I showed in my exhibition at CSC in 2012 where I showed objects from home, including a diverse collection of cups, around some recent pots of mine. These things that I live with are what could be called a study collection in the modernist tradition that is so well represented in the archives at CSC.  Research material – samples and artefacts gathered by Barron and Larcher, Peter Collingwood, Ethel Mairet, Bernard Leach and others – is a profoundly important underpinning of the collections of things they made.

In my exhibition Life and Still Life I showed the small Illsley lady in the same show case with his giant wooden beads from the 1970s that normally hang on a butcher's rail in my studio, and a hand written and constructed book in a painted cardboard box, made in 2004.

Bryan Illsley: Souvenirs of St Ives. Works 1978 – 1986 was the title of the first solo exhibition Bryan had after returning to London, held in 1988 at Contemporary Applied Arts.  I wrote the gallery leaflet for it and I will end with this quote from the end of that essay:

"The idea of being an artist was not one that came to him on a plate. The work is evidence of a long and independent battle, and is powerfully expressive of humour as well as anguish. It is tough but never bleak. William Blake wrote:

'Man was made for joy and woe

And when this we rightly know

Thro' the world we safely go'

which I think Bryan Illsley would appreciate."