Creative Roads featuring Phil Rogers with David and Margaret Frith.

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] mark has a lot of energy and she comes down in the morning and within five minutes of being in the workshops also just using of the wheel I just don't know how she do it and it takes him to take me ages to get into into the clay you know it all seems to be other jobs that I have to do first this is clay that has been used once or twice and it's been reclaimed and broken down into a liquid which we call slip let's put in the troughs and this is probably being here for about eight or ten weeks just flying out ready for use but this really will make a lovely porcelain clay for Margaret to use every morning you wake up when David loves those birds and if you see a Kingfisher flying faster which is not every day let's say it is a lovely set into work and we've always been self-employed so we've always have that element done you have to do it yourself and risk and there were all sorts of risk to being a part of and most Potter's scratch people tend to a very minimal salary fortunately the beetle is working and they're not healthy [Music] it's not easy to sell to us it doesn't matter where you are who you are very few people enter part of the door you always have to be working at selling the only real exception I think would probably be in Japan where pots do fetch incredibly high prices even new pots pots from you know that appear from the kiln can fetch twenty twenty-five thousand pounds straight from the kiln you say pottery to the non Potter and they immediately think of the potter's wheel that's just the way it is and so with these press molded pieces I have also noticed that they have become sort of quite sought-after because they're on their unusual in the fact that they're not thrown I lived in Korea for about four months and I've always been interested in Korean ceramics particularly 15th 16th century and many of them were they weren't molded but they were made in such a way as you might have thought that they were they were very sharp edged very flat very square and when I came back I kind of started to make things which were based on the sort of memories of having seen those things plus the fact that I started off life as a painter I was never very good at it but anyway I got kind of used to thinking in terms of rectangles and squares and because I'm not a natural decorator of pots it always helps me if the pot is divided up into two phases all three Potter's have traveled to Japan and Korea a spiritual home of ceramics where pottery is held in high esteem they were influenced by Bernard leach pioneered Britain ceramic revival in the 20s when he brought back styles and techniques from the audience to his workshop in st. Ives I was living just outside Cambridge and there was a gallery there which I used to frequent most Saturdays and at that time they used to sell work by people like bernie H and Richard batter I'm Michael card.you and I was very much learning and those people became sort of absentee tutors so that I would go home and try to make aspects of those parts that I've seen I wasn't trying to copy the pots I was just trying to make that particular lid or that particular spout or make a handle in that particular way and they all became my teachers we all have n choices every Potter happening has an influence it's just what you do with those influences you have to try to bend them to the way you think and to come up with something that is than yours and it's your voice though that leach said but it's okay to be influenced but the quote he said was that you it was important that you should drive your wagon over the bones of the dead [Music] David and Margaret met while of college and still share the same ideals after 40 years of working together it's so important when you're making positive you do have good clay it declares a bit too hard or a bit too soft or a little short it makes life a lot more difficult it is if it's right and it's spot-on for what you want to do and it's it's really nice just looking down and making costs and this makes really lovely kettles at work with nice and plastic nice and soft you know what's almost foreign Celtics played magical somebody asked me once how much I value these in sheaves and them I said that if I had a choice you know between my Dearing pokemon or Margaret I might have to think a little bit we're both very practical hands-on people I think in which you have to be if you're going to convert old buildings you build kilns build everything you could do Ellen but you've got to turn your hands to everything and we were both that sort of people ready to take on the challenge and then it's definitely wanting to explore clothing you can sit on your wheel or just make a shape at this stage but you've got to decide now what shape it's going to be because depending on how you make the centre and how far you go down and what you make the base with this piece because it's good to be added onto the top of the bottle I'd go right down to the wheel head so I'm not leaving the beige in there and I'm just going to open up a little bit and then pull up the shape we have nothing about twelve friends are thinking money but lots of enthusiasm which is the main thing I think 60s became an interesting period for parties because suddenly it was a tremendous demand for or functional work for them dinner plates and mugs and balls and things like that and if the ear of the kind of firm tofu game industry in lemon and they would buy handmade books and jokes and things to service crudo in the 1960s and 70s pottery was actually on a high the boom time where it was the thing to do was to take grinding Homer a little pot when you'd been on holiday and I just caught the tail end of that and it it helped us to survive actually for the first couple of years and there were a lot of potters each village has almost had a Potter so in those days I did make lots of little pots and mugs and jugs and little cereal bowls and so on that was the sort of main backbone of what we did people seem to think oh it's press molded or that's not really as good as throw you know but in fact the actual mold itself takes about two and a half days work to make the mold by the time you've made the original and then set it all up to do the casting and everything it takes about two and a half days and each pressing of a pot like exactly what I'm doing now the time that it takes me to do this I could throw four or five pots of a similar kind of size so it's it's most certainly not a shortcut because they're so time-consuming to make I have a job to keep up with them and I do have assistants here occasionally and the first thing I teach them to do is how to make me press molds so that they can be making these while I'm doing something else and then I come and finish them off afterwards so you know I will put the tops on them in song but you know once I've made the mold and once I've made the original it doesn't matter actually who puts the clay into the mold it's relevant I mean if you go to Japan and you camel cos workshop for instance now I mean a lot of pots that are made in that workshop that he never touches except maybe to put a few brushstrokes on at the end and then all the pots are sold as his from that workshop and I don't see anything wrong with that he designed them he figured out the decoration he figured out the glazes he has a final touch so his hand has actually touched the pot and brush decorated I find that that's okay I would kind of draw the line I don't really want other people throwing my pots if I'm going to make some pots of the throw and then I think I should throw them is so this could be enlarged plate and they're going to partly throw it and I'm going to cut some clay off the sides I'm just going to use this piece of wine algis to slice his clay away I don't know who did it originally I mean I've been using him for a long time I hadn't seen anybody else doing it when when I first started doing it but I'm sure somebody was somewhere I'm just going to get now that I've done that and throw this clay in the normal way what I want to achieve is a kind of a of tag no shape the clay scalloped at the edge in the natural way for three years I didn't have a real arrogant and I would hire account from the friend to fire his proxy it was all domestic around that flea market they weren't a personal piece but the rules within the tradition of slipware rather than West Clare making which was a wonderful tradition in this country for them back from medieval times it was ant a sort of industry when things was regimented in Victorian closet a movement diversity at that time we actually just could not produce enough pots we employed several people at one point but we found that it's very difficult to develop our own personal work when you have the workshop force behind you and you have to keep them off to five and then keep them busy eventually we had a little malice van and we still girl ran North Wales it was in itself right down to Southland and everywhere I had a beginnings of the craft movement and it was good from instead we got about 26 feelings for every six people but we survived I've always loved Chinese fortune I was always love Claire but porcelain which held a fascination for man I couldn't work with it straight away Matt you know and we were making domestic wear and I had a family and the students the boys grew up a little bit more so you weren't playing mum slack all the time but I started to develop and interesting I can them real research into it really and of course now it can make them play play myself I mean porcelain clay was very expensive play and still is but for me to be able to have the facilities outside there to make it and then obviously I can make it much cheaper than I could buy it for this is porcelain clay that Margaret has used and that I'm reclaiming to use it again and the best way of doing that we to get the best quality clay is to break it down into a liquid slip and run out and into the troughs to dry in a week's time a lot of the water in this clay will have run off until have hardened shrunk and then I just have to bend the material but to stop the edges drying too much and it's just less intense ready to come out it could be up to anything between two and ten weeks any on the weather there's now an international demand for Margaret and David Fritz individual pieces but the techniques and skills they have learned over the years came about by trial and error there was little written knowledge about pottery when they set out on their creative road [Music] with both dr. deep interest in discovering about plays and glazes and highly interactive firings and such like so I think this provision both of our work will we mix our own clays and we make all our own glazes we have to grind and win some of the materials that use now glazes ourselves which make them more interesting and all that kind of work I enjoy doing I join making tools so it's all kind of a complete thing this is just using gum a piece of rope to impress into the clay and then this is quite a light filing clay so I will paint some fire clay which fires to darker color on top of this let that dry slightly and then scrape it off the surface I did quite a lot of floral carbon in such life but now the decoration has gone a little bolder I would say and it's a sort of dichotomy between the tightness of making the porcelain and then there's a soft side of me that wants to be instant in creative and then the most beautiful things like child out the most beautiful things happen when you sort of unaware of it I mean lasted that terribly difficult thing to achieve and possibly never will but it's that freedom and spontaneity opposed to the times to working with porcelain because it breaks very easily said she's balance of two things is the sort of mad side of you and then the cautious side of you and between two to balance it out I hope I always feel in David's pots this part of me and I'm sure than my pots this broth of part of him so we're very much a partnership I would say with Devin are not balancing the scale there's certainly no jealousy I mean if David gets a lovely pot over the kill I'm very happy for him and vigor to protect the girls he's really happy for major there's really Ellis's identical I often will give people the recipes for my glazes in the same way that people have given me recipes over the years I've also written three books which are all full of my glaze recipes so there's no point in being secretive because if you've got you can buy the book and read it anyway in a lot of the glazes that I use are based on wood ash that was what I wrote the book about and kind of the it's kind of my little thing really so I used different ashes in different glazes and different ashes from the different trees will give you slightly different colors so pine is a slightly darker sort of bottle green whereas the ashes from oak for instance or from any of the hardwood trees beech give you a slightly like a more bluish kind of green this is reduction fired stoneware it's a glaze in the conventional sense in other words a glaze made from powdered rocks mixed with wood ash placed on the pot placed into the kiln and then the heat from the kiln simply melts those rocks and that wood ash into glass and these marks this pattern I applied with a brush and this is essentially rust it's iron oxide finally powdered iron oxide which you can use as a painted pigment [Music] soft glazing where salt is thrown into the kiln of epoxy fired is a particular trademark of Phil's work this is a typically salt glazed pot on the sort of colors and textures that one would expect from sole glaze this is a typical sole claims pattern we call it the orange peel pattern and you can see that why we call it that it's got that sort of slightly textured slightly puckered look it's a way of making pots which is unlike any other the surfaces and the colors you cannot get in any other kiln other than a salt go to very arduous it's a very capricious it's a very hard way of firing because it can kick you in the teeth if it doesn't go well it's a disaster but when it goes really well it can be breathtaking there's a very buoyant market in London in the auction houses for instance for 20th century ceramics and of course when people are paying large amounts of money in the auction houses for the likes of Hamid or Bernard leach it means that we all get sucked along we all get drawn up the ladder a little bit I mean I sell about a quarter of what I make to a gallery in America in Boston and it constantly amazes me that the price is that some of the pots make in the USA and I'm very grateful for it and I'm very flattered by it and and I've always wanted to see ceramics brought to the same level as fine art as painting and sculptor and to see ceramics exhibited on an equal footing with other art forms why not constantly experimenting the frisks are working on a commission for a tiled panel it's a mirror which are making which I want these sort of colorings and there's about four layers at least some there which basically some blue some iron and then wax lines in between and as they all melt them England to one another so hopefully in the filing we're going to get an effect something like that at this stage it doesn't resemble those colors at all I started with the base glaze then I put a blue pigment on all over which looks rather Brown now but which actually would come blue this is now a car key glaze it's a Chinese oriental glaze which is a deep am but you've got three layers now then there's another line of wax been printed that it's candle wax and palaces the hot wax resist so if you put wax between its lenses will resist the British rapture and of course that need then the final color is going to rhombus top which is copper reading this is white looking white monocular this is this red yogic red with a very small proportion of copper carbonate which normal circumstances will give you greens but in reduction violence it would be various shades of pinks reds and purples hopefully never think that would be ready I suppose is quite a strange partnership because then it's probably about forty five or six years that we've been working with each other is probably muscle off alot would you agree about reading I want to burden you care about the things you know maybe it's the wrong thing to do and draw whatever and but it works this is a small task in which we it's used just basically for testing you glazes new materials and things like that so five us today and we'll get the results out tomorrow you really don't know what the hospital's like until comes out you can doesn't matter how much work or whatever you're done going into the calendars when it comes out and that's a little defined unlike any other thing you know we may get painting or sculpture you can see how it's looking as you how it's going to be finished at your target or maybe to you but we thought you can't it's all dependent on the fire I've traveled a lot and especially in the last ten years and I would never have been able to do that adeno added not being for ceramics I've been asked to do workshops and to exhibit in different countries and it's taken me to Korea to Japan to South Africa to Ethiopia to Canada to America so most of the European countries I would never have been able to do that I would never have been able to afford to do it but ceramics is paid for it in a way and it's been marvelous yeah absolutely not I love being involved in clay and then it's always had a fascination and the fascination it's well it's become an obsession I think I can't imagine doing anything never ever doing anything else with isn't making the making pots well I don't think is really tiring let go a bit slower sometimes but part is working too lately you know there's an awful lot to learn and understand I would say two lifetimes wouldn't be sufficient the long path as usually a creative road but it's quite a long road [Music]

Channel: Phil Rogers

Views: 18,716

Rating: 4.8833332 out of 5

Keywords: pottery, Frith, Phil Rogers

Id: UhdnW9LWYlQ

Length: 23min 5sec (1385 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 06 2017