Professor Nigel Wood: The Mysterious Iuohan of Saint Petersburg

The Crafts Study Centre is delighted to announce that the inaugural Henry Hammond Memorial lecture will be given by the distinguished ceramic historian Professor Nigel Wood. He is Emeritus Professor to the University of Westminster, a member of the Sub Faculty of Archaeology at Oxford University and an Academic Committee Member of the Key Base of the State Administration of Cultural heritage for Scientific Research on Ancient Ceramics in China (Palace Museum, Beijing).

Professor Wood is also a practising potter, and studied ceramics at the West Surrey College of Art &
Design (1969-72), where his tutor was Henry Hammond. His lecture will be prefaced by reflections on Hammond’s contribution to ceramic education and studio pottery, and then focus on recent research with the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg on a life-sized glazed ceramic luohan from Yixian in Hebei. Professor Wood is currently establishing a new ceramics studio in Tichborne, Hampshire.

Henry Hammond MBE (1914-1989) combined the roles of studio potter and ceramic educator. Hammond trained at the Croydon School of Art, followed by a scholarship to the Royal College of Art where he joined the pottery classes of William Staite Murray. He made important contributions to the development of ceramics in the Anglo-Oriental tradition, (although he also made slipware in the second half of the 1940’s) maintaining a studio in Bentley, Hampshire which he shared (from 1948) with Paul Barron.

Hammond began his teaching career as a pottery instructor at the West Surrey College of Art & Design (then Farnham School of Art) taking up the post after the second world war. In lecture notes in the 1950’s he observed: ‘Synthesis must be achieved inside individuals. . . as a direct result of their own inner experience. Crafts among other things provides that experience. It is the activity, the contact with materials, that matters’. John Houston said that his pots were ‘quickened by [his] roving, hopeful and impatient spririt’.

He was Head of Ceramics by the time of his retirement in 1980 and was a Founder Trustee of the Crafts Study Centre.

TICKETS : £5.00 advanced booking is required

RECEPTION : 5.30pm - 6.00pm

LECTURE : 6.00pm - 7.00pm

The lecture series is made possible by generous funding from the Henry Hammond Trust. It is the intention to hold the series annually alternating between Farnham and London.