Search and renewal : An essay by David Whiting

Who is David Whiting?

David Whiting

David Whiting is a writer and curator. He is a member of the International Association of Art Critics, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He has written and contributed to several books, as well as numerous exhibition catalogues, and has curated exhibitions both in the public and private sectors. He has specialised in contemporary studio craft, particularly ceramics, but has also written extensively on painting, sculpture and design, and was for over a decade a tutor in art history in Oxford and London, before taking up writing full-time. He has written for many art and literary periodicals, and contributes obituaries to the Guardian. He is also literary co-executor to the estate of C. Day-Lewis, the former Poet Laureate, and his wife Jill Balcon, and is a trustee of the Anthony Shaw Collection, a large holding of modern ceramics, painting and sculpture currently held at York Art Gallery. He has been an external assessor for several leading university ceramics courses.

BEN DODD; SEARCH AND RENEWAL

Ben Dodd is fine evidence that a 'Leachian school' is alive and well in Britain. He is part of a younger generation of Leach-influenced potters, a small but strong group who are adding something significant to a European-Oriental language in studio ceramics. Ben has clay in his blood. He is, after all, the son of the potter Mike Dodd, which might prove a hard act to follow, except that Ben is clearly his own man. While he is part of the same Leach lineage, and has learnt so much from Mike, there is no mistaking his own very individual response to a philosophy of making pots rooted in the direct collection and processing of natural materials. One that focusses the acts of eating and drinking, and provides an everyday sculpture too, beautiful forms that give life to our rooms and spaces.

Ben has pursued other avenues of work in his time, more recently to sustain his work in the studio. Most notably this has included his continuing commitment as a teacher of pottery, which far from being disruptive, has allowed Ben to keep his hand in, adding its own rhythm to the creative schedule of his work, one no doubt feeding into the other. The hours he puts in have certainly paid dividends as he experiments and plays with new variations of shape, surface and coloration. You can distinguish a Ben Dodd pot from the outset - bowls of various size, yunomi's, cups, bottles and vases, platters and covered dishes. He makes most forms, embellished perhaps with his individual impressed (or paddled)  decoration, along with incising, brushing and broad cutting which is always crisp and succinct. He knows when to avoid overload, so there is a welcome reticence of design and surface treatment, allowing the quiet confidence of his shapes, slips and glazes to speak for themselves. He explores a range of ashes, sometimes augmented by irons, granites and basalts. Slips add depth and character. Glazes gather generously in the carving and indents of a pot’s contours. Brevity is certainly the key, whether it is the finger wipes through tenmoku or, using a hakeme brush, his rapid gestural marking through clay slip.

Ben rightly regards his particular hakeme work as a hallmark, sometimes using an unusual and successful upward brush movement on bowls and bottles that gives them a quite different dynamic, completing the sense of integration between slip and underlying body. His spontaneous brushing is effective on dishes too, succinctly abstract but also evoking natural textures in the landscape.  His other signature pieces include covetable yunomi’s and sake cups. Free cut-siding on satisfyingly chunky shapes makes them particularly tactile and good in the hand, the weight just right. The textured vases are among his father’s most recognisable pieces, but Ben has made them his own too, with his variations of profile and detail. Here, looking at his nuka glazes running down over the drier surfaces, the sense of fresh flood covering a droughted riverbed came to my mind. Indeed this is one of the aspects that defines his glazing, the thoughtful combinations of the liquid and the matt, as well as the nuances of coloration derived from his choice of minerals.

Following his work over the past few years, we have seen how much he has developed as a potter, and how the many hours he is putting in has brought its own fluidity, a kind of relaxation and a freer hand which only continuous practice can give. I have to be honest and say that much so-called ’traditional’ pottery being produced now leaves me flat, there is comparatively little that really excites. It follows a derivative routine. But Ben Dodd is proving to be different, because there is always a sense of search and freshness here, and surprises too, making one realise just how much the Leach-Hamada aesthetic still has to say.


David Whiting