Professor Simon Olding, Director of the Crafts Study Centre

The links between the Crafts Study Centre and The Leach Pottery in St Ives are deep and resonant to this day. Bernard Leach and his indomitable wife, Janet, came together (though they were living apart) to decide upon a great gift of work to the newly established collection including, so Bernard wrote, ‘a list of pots by me, and of old classic pots including some which are valuable’. Although Leach may have meant financially valuable, I think he meant, too, emotionally-rich, for these were pots that he had gathered by his side since his very earliest days as a practising potter in Japan (his very first work was made in 1911). These pots could summon him back to his youth, as they could summon him back to the 12th century, for in this personal collection were held works of antiquity as well as those fresh from firing. They represented the most personal of catalogues. In 1979 Leach wrote a foreword to what was to prove the very final exhibition he was involved in, and thus his last word. The show was held at the Crafts Study Centre’s home, then in The Holburne Museum, Bath, and he recounted that the pots ‘have stimulated me, and given me inspiration, as I hope they will now do for other potters who come to see them’.

Since The Leach Pottery reopened after its remarkable and important restoration, the links between our institutions have rekindled. The Crafts Study Centre is now located in Farnham but the Leach collections are still foundational to our purpose, and we appreciate the chance to lend them back to St Ives when possible. These links are personal-and-professional. I have been highly privileged to have been a board member of The Leach Pottery, ending my time with two years as Chair. I could see at first hand the inspirational work that took place there, to safeguard the precious property and its historic working spaces; to see the energy and vitality of the pottery classes running at high intensity; to see changing exhibitions and through them the world-wide legacy of the Leach pottery traditions, and finally to see how the newly built pottery studios were producing fine domestic works in the spirit of the Leach standard ware, made for new generations.

When I stepped down after some eight years, it was a bitter sweet moment.

But a wonderful thing happened that day. After my final trustee’s meeting, we repaired to the garden. We had a pasty lunch. The St Ives Times & Echo sent a reporter. There were speeches. There was cake. And there was a farewell pot for me, a gift of heart-stopping generosity. It was made by Roelof Uys, who runs the studio. The stoneware bowl has a tenmoku glaze…in the Leach way…and it has a stencilled design cutting through a copper-green glaze that is a harking back to a glaze first considered by the Canadian potter John Reeve who worked in St Ives a while; and then often used by Trevor Corser, who, along with Joanna Wason were the last two potters to work at The Leach Pottery before its re-opening. Stamped into the foot are three words: romantic; rebellious; radical. Leach was, in his way, all of these things, although those ways were often contested and sometimes cutting rather than collegiate.

So in this one, majestic pot, handed over seeming-warm from the kiln, were embedded not just words, but the idea and the poetry of the place, and the clay-visioning of the potters who work there still, teasing out legends in their own ways, to make them sing for tomorrow.