S10 E2: Heath Ceramics - The Making of a California Classic

Edythe design the coop dinnerware it's American classic for sure but it's a landmark design so it's part of the foundation of modern design it is literally timeless it's strong a sturdy she built all this into it it's meant to be used somebody has to be the foundation for good design and dinnerware and who better than Edith Heath really I wanted to make something that was for the American Way of life not the kind of dishes that were used in Europe among the aristocracy but much more peasant oriented yet it could be for Sunday best as well as everyday use [Music] you [Music] [Music] [Music] this program was made possible in part by a grant from an r/a foundation a Margaret a Cargill philanthropy the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs the California humanities and the California Arts Council [Music] I think there's so much to learn from people like Edith Heath I think she was a technical genius she was really clear about what she liked and what she didn't like if she had an idea of something it would be a rough go to talk her out of it she was stubborn as anything she was the most creative person I've ever known for me I would describe her as an explorer always pushing her boundary she want to try something new she want to keep exploring Edith Eve really matters she was really a trailblazer but we haven't really told her story yet when we first took over Heath in 2003 we were very conscious of learning all the processes in the factory and understanding the reasons behind them because it all affects how the final product comes out my favorite time in the factory is when I get there early in the morning a little bit after the crew has gotten there and and it's exciting because that's when we opened the kilns it's like Christmas every day it's something that gives everybody joy because they want to see what happened to the pieces they glazed yesterday do they come out right the firing is what gives birth to all these beautiful pieces [Music] I don't know if Edith was ahead of her time but she was very intentional about what she set out to do I mean she designed the clay that we use today and that clay was an integral foundation to everything that came afterwards the other famous designers were using someone else's and just you know giving the shape form or color to eat a thief the science was just as important as the art Edith grew up on this farm in Iowa with a lot of other siblings who she was often taken care of and doing a lot of firm work my mother didn't feel that it was important for girls to go to school I think her reluctance of having me go to school is that I wasn't around then to be as much help her parents were Danish immigrants her maternal grandfather was a really fervent socialist back in Denmark and her mother had kind of carried that philosophy to the United States and was Anita's telling of it often kind of resentful of living in the US and having this farm life there one good thing was that her father really wanted all of the kids to go to school that was a big thing for young women living on the farm in rural America but unfortunately when we started moving into the depression in 1928 in 1929 the family lost the farm and Edith recalls the auction that took place they had to basically sell off all their belongings so the only thing that was left with a table a few chairs some beds and then a piano and the Havel in China and the latter two didn't sell because no one could afford those items at the time so it did have a lasting impact on Edith and that she saw that the Havilland China was essentially like a useless object like just there for an aesthetic value [Music] this was valued and her family was passed down and was considered an heirloom and she saw it as something that was kind of revered and only used on special occasions and she didn't understand why you have a China that you only used like once a year the hewill in China is actually made out of porcelain and it's very delicate and Edith didn't want to make just delicate pieces she wanted to make durable pieces our play body which is Heath's original clay body still comes from a clay pet outside of Sacramento California you can't get closer to being a California prize than being made in the States earth ceramics is one of the oldest trades in the world dictating the location and development of societies throughout history clay was first formed into objects from figures to functional vessels and our history can be traced through this medium for 70 years this clay pet has been the foundation of his ceramics it is where eita started it's the seed of her whole life's work it's exciting to be walking in her footsteps and seeing what she saw at the beginning the thing that's interesting about ceramics is you're taking clay of the earth and you're using your hands to give it form and you're connecting with earth there's a pianist to it and there's a direct connection that you don't have in other mediums in the beginning this is a very good way to start a book because it makes one try to imagine what was the earth was a red-hot molten mass of chemicals and minerals bubbling Edith was a prolific writer and it's interesting to see that throughout her life she took notes on her relationship with clay when I'm going through the archives and looking at all these various notes and letters that she's written I really get a sense that I'm inside of Edith mind she always wanted to educate people so it's her trying to get her story out and her trying to talk through processes and what she felt was important it's like the philosophical underpinnings of her work one of the things that the bankruptcy taught her was that she wanted to basically be on her own and not not rely on anyone else and become independent she saved up enough money to go to the Chicago Teachers College where she was exposed to various art classes and and really found her love for art and then she went to the Chicago Art Institute men are going to work for the government by the millions on new buildings roads schools bridges anything to get be forgotten Nana's Roosevelt calls him off the bread lines and on the job any job WPA it stands for Works Progress Administration Edith was really involved in WPA programming and during that time she worked at the leaders training school in Chicago and she also was working at a training camp in Batavia Illinois where these groups from the leaders training school would travel for a week at a time and receive this kind of experience education out on the land Edith had this pretty amazing opportunity to work at the Batavia school and joined forces with Holger Cahill who was one of the founders of the federal art project as well as lászló moholy-nagy who started the new Bauhaus in Chicago and came from the Bauhaus in Germany the Bauhaus movement it was anti specialization artists mixed in with designers with dancers this idea that creativity has no bounds science was also respected there were all these people in these different creative disciplines that came together and sort of shared ideas and this had a huge impact on her there was a sort of democratization within this creative environment the Depression years of the 30s were probably the most important satisfying years of my life they sustained me whenever things are rough in the midst of hunger and starvation a cultural awakening it took place that changed the economy and brought hope for a more human environment there was a guy named Brian Heath who was the camp director Brian was studying to become a social worker Edith and Brian were actually quite different he had a wealth of experiences that she never had Brian found something in her he hadn't experienced growing up and so together they made for a very good pair we met there in early May of 1938 we were married three months later after they got married Brian took a job with the American Red Cross in San Francisco when they arrived in San Francisco Edith took a job as an art teacher at the presidio hill school and started auditing classes at the Art Institute when she moved to San Francisco she partially picked the Julia Morgan apartment on Philbert Street because it was in two blocks of the San Francisco Art Institute it seems that when she was at this Chicago Art Institute she got more into painting but the thing that was wrong with painting for her is that it didn't appeal to her useful or practical side painting is so easy you can see what you're doing in ceramics you can't see the color it's going to be until it's been through the fire so you're always working from a memory of what it should or could look like but it's so infinite there's no end to where it can go the clay was really the medium that she felt most comfortable with because it had a certain malleability she could control it a little but also I think it gave her something that she could experiment with over time but the problem there was that there were more people in the class than potter's wheels and so that was one Brian made potter's wheel for her out of a sewing machine and so Edith began making pottery in her kitchen she had a test kiln in the kitchen and Clay's materials in the pantry and a gas kiln in the laundry room one of the important things to realize is that Edith was talented with ceramics from the very beginning if anybody's ever thrown a pot you can sit there at the wheel and it either comes very naturally to you to Center that clay and to raise that pot up or you're going to struggle with it and Edith was very it was a very natural thing for her to do ceramic is a thousand years of tradition and the process that I'm making is almost zero difference than HEDIS as I start working with clay with my hand what I find out is that is very tactile your mind has a vision but it's about the body of the clay and your hand making it sometimes they align sometimes they are not I may have a very precise idea what I want to do but at the end of the day I will just follow my hand and see how the clay work so it's kind of like a collaboration between my thought and the wheel [Music] I never get tired of watching the process my formless lump of clay becomes this beautiful form you get a plate or a bowl it's always a beautiful process to see that transformation in our art history classes we had studied clays and the vessels coming from around the world every civilization always had things made out of clay she also really emphasized the idea that clay is all over the world and cheap and affordable and should be used to make an affordable life Edythe primarily had access to pre-mixed clays and those clays didn't meet her needs she found them to be what she called gutless clays are mined and then mixed together in order to create a clay body every clay body has its own characteristics I believe youth who's looking for a clay body that really held what California land was for her within its aesthetic quality the most important thing with ceramics is where the clay and the materials come from because the development of societies in every period in history was influenced by the location and kind of clay deposits around the world Brian and I spent weekends driving to wherever we heard there was a clay pit I was looking for clay when I began potting that nobody knew anything about that had unique properties that I could utilize and develop that would be expressive of the region that would dead turn out to look like something that nobody else had ever made she was traveling to all of these clothes down brick yards and clay pits because of the war and taking clay just like clambering down into the clay pits and stealing clay with a bucket and bringing it down back to her kitchen studio and testing these raw materials and this led to an explosion of innovation and she ran through thousands of clay and glazed tests she was testing the plasticity of the clay she was testing its shrinkage and a variety of other technical specifications their travels led them to a small town called Lincoln which is just outside of Sacramento in Lincoln they found that a great Inland Sea had deposited some really wonderful clay that she felt was indicative of the landscape and of Northern California it informed the style of her ware and it made Heath Heath Edith was looking for the clay that reflected the way California felt to her and the way that people lived that clay comes into Heath in a powdered form it's mixed with other clays from elsewhere and other different materials that give it its different characteristics around how it's going to melt and how it's gonna hold together how it takes the glaze that's what makes up the clay body and the formula [Music] [Music] that clay is then mixed with water and then it goes under pressure and cessation called a filter press and that excess water will drain out of that filter press [Music] [Music] to the clay body that Edith ultimately landed on and was really proud of was quintessential to stoneware in her writing she puts this emphasis on stoneware over porcelain and stoneware over earthenware it's strong its durable a lot of the instigation of her material investigation came out of this concept of view tactics which she was taught at the UC extension in 1942 Edith petitioned the University of California to do a course on ceramics chemistry because she was interested in the science behind making ceramics she wanted to fire at the lowest temperature possible one of the ways that she did that was by using a eutectic in the clay body and the eutectic is when you have two ingredients which when mixed together meld at a lower temperature than either of them would melt by themselves she did not want to be concocting design she wanted the materials to make the design be the design clay was always at the heart of her where she worked very hard to create this clay body that she could have fell in love with edith was very lucky in the sense that she was offered a show really early on her career at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco the Legion of Honor is obviously a very prestigious museum even back in the mid 40s when she showed there were plates vases tea services and a variety of different kinds of glazes and it was that show that really helped her establish I think what she wanted her line to be even before she knew there was going to be a lying [Music] at the opening of the exhibition Edith met bill Brewer a buyer for Gump's one of the great San Francisco stores it was a real taste maker as soon as bill saw the work he consigned the entire collection so that he could sell it at Gump's bill also offered Edith a unique opportunity Gump's had a small ceramics factory in Chinatown so they offered her a studio for $50 a month on clay street and that they would have first right of refusal for whatever products or dinnerware she was making [Music] [Music] it's just pure material it's clay and it's glazed and then all of the color is coming from the natural elements in the clay and the glaze so that's what made the heath line very unique as the war wound down so did the need for services provided by the American Red Cross and Brian decided that he would join them as kind of manager of the studio he was building machines that you know facilitated the increase in production I mean I think she was open-minded about the idea of switching to mechanical reproduction and I think she was influenced by the Bauhaus principles and and the idea that you could still create good design even if you're making many of those products and she still always used the potter's wheel to create prototypes so she didn't believe that just because you know they were using machines for a certain part of production you still had to come up with those ideas in your mind [Music] good design doesn't depend on whether something is made by hand in fact there are some very junky things that can be made by hand the idea of making things on a potter's wheel in an industrial society really was an anachronism as far as I was concerned it was okay while I was learning and getting a feel for the clay but after all a machine doesn't decide what the shape is going to be a human being has to decide that so I felt I was in as much control as ever the wheel was something that could increase their production you have a mold and you take your clay and you put it down on the mold and it spins and then you bring this profile down so instead of your hands being there creating the walls you have this machine that's doing it for you the transition from studio Potter to industrial designer really upset a lot of the studio Potter associations that Edith had initially been involved with you have Edith a member of the San Francisco Potter's Association turning her back on hand thrown where many of them suggested that she drop out and eventually she did people told her your selling out she didn't believe though she said no I'm not selling out I'm taking what we're doing I'm taking it to another level I think more than anything else Edith was an iconoclast Edith it definitely was not a joiner I think that she was associated with a different political or creative groups at one time or another but really she forged her own PAP and had her own ideas about how she wanted to approach her life and work slip casting is another way to create a product basically you have a mold the molds made out of plaster and you have a slip where the slip is basically a clay body with water added to it so it's liquid [Music] it will then dry and then you can take it out of the mold and you have this clay object that is in the shape of the mold clay and plaster have an interesting relationship the reason you're using the plaster is it will with the moisture away from the clay and the piece that's been formed the clay shrinks and it naturally will come away from the mold [Music] [Music] at that point you have a solid but very brittle piece you have to handle it very carefully or it will chip and crack she said why limit what I'm able to do if I'm able to produce more and it still has that quality then I can lower the prices of it and good design can be affordable to everybody that's what she thought so I think at the time Edith really filled a unique role in that she didn't fit into the studio Potter model of these Potter's making one-off pieces and getting acclaimed awards for that but not really stepping up their production and she also didn't fit into the Russell right Steubenville or Fiestaware model of making mass-produced ceramics that were designed by someone and made by someone else entirely and so the fact that she was the designer and was also in the factory every day did give her a really unique perspective on ceramics that I think you can see in the product [Music] Future Amick it's a brand new word for dramatic design of the future in the late 40s the war had finished and America became confident and so there's a sort of optimism and this growth people were wanting to make things that expressed America and the kind of populist the mid-century modernist design was about that you know there's no longer you know this ideal of there's certain things that are made for upper-class folks and for others you know basically the middle class was defining ideal of that epoch Edgar Kaufmann was a curator at MoMA and Edith Heath first met him when she had a studio at Gump's and he was looking for pieces to put in exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art Museum exhibitions were held of local crafts people's work they had what was called the everyday arts exhibitions of everyday art which included everything from flatware to glassware to dinnerware to automobiles to anything that was manufactured and things were juried as to whether they could get in whether they had sufficient quality to be considered of good design then several years later they were both us to be on a ceramic jury of in Portland Oregon and Edith tells the story about how they drove from California to Oregon and they they talked the entire way and Kaufman said to her you know Edith you're a classic and he just said what are you talking about we've only been on the market for a few years how could I possibly be a classic and Kaufman basically said you know mark my word from from now on all dinnerware made in the United States will be judged against what you have created this was a super significant moment in her life designers and artists like politicians have an acute sense of time of times changing they have a sense of history of what has happened before of what is happening now and of what is about to happen if there was really one thing that sent Keith on its path to prosperity it was the fortuitous meeting with Nelson Gustin the owner of the ns company which was a distributor of ceramics they realized well there's a market out there beyond Richard gobs so she was smart enough to leave him and take what she knew and go to the next step Dustin is talking East Coast West Coast all of America Gustin offered to be the sole distributor of Edith's work and he also agreed to purchase everything she produced during her first year of operation they offered Edith the seed money to move from guns and the Clay Street studio over to Sausalito to the Mason Ferry Building and sort of set up shop over there and start a more commercialized production of key ceramics instead of the hand thrown Sausalito is known for its houseboat communities they were there before the shipbuilders came and they certainly are still there today and Edith and Brian jumped right in headfirst all the people who lived on the waterfront were improvising housing of one kind or another that's one of the reasons we bought the barge there was all this lumber that had been left from the shipyards and that's what we built a house out of the Dorothea was Edith and Brian's barge very unique compared to most houseboats and it had a roof that opened completely when it was in her living room she was virtually outside all the time so I think that experience really shaped her idea of what a California lifestyle is and and what Heath ware was Edith's hand thrown dinnerware was the inspiration for her first true line called the coop line when it was released in 1947 the coop line was very popular the coop line was a synthesis of all the ideas and all of ADA's experiences to date simplicity and beauty endurance the organic qualities being of the earth all those things went into the making of the coop line if I have to write an article about coop and describe the design I cannot there's no decoration on it and it's just this circle expressing the color of the glaze the material of the clay and I think that become cool I think the coop line for me is so distinct it's because they are not distinct the other nice element about the coop line is just the gentle edge it's also very durable and that's what Edith really wanted to make sure that these plates were beautiful and elegant but were durable enough for everyday wear I don't like highly stylized things I like things that are easy soft shapes that are more like a folk dance as compared with ballet I didn't think the American Way of life was that disciplined people are much more easygoing more humane and less concerned with status in other words I was trying to do something that was more egalitarian rather than aristocratic the way I think about it is like it's the blue jeans of dinnerware it's just so versatile and that was kind of this California ideal at the time and so for her that line was being able to sell something to the masses that was a work of art but was also available and accessible edith always talked about the International Design Conference in Aspen as one of the formative experiences of her life it basically brought together people in the business worlds with people in the design world she and Bryan would go there every year starting in the mid-1950s one of the big things that they talked about was this idea of planned obsolescence and so this was a big debate obviously between people in the business world and people in the design world some questioned the motive of designing for obsolescence and the response was well if you didn't design for obsolescence eventually if everything lasted forever business would fail we are living in such a mixed-up chaotic period in the arts in politics economics everyone is standing on his head or doing something weird in the way of creativity we are wasting Natural Resources we must learn to conserve no longer can we throw things away people will become more sober minded and make things that are really needed instead of just having a good time or getting rich quick Edith's her whole career I never wanted to throw anything away so the idea of designing something to be thrown away was so opposite her value system and she fervently believed that no I make a product that can be used forever and that's why I believe in it [Music] I want others to dream with me to build factories that are fun to work in places of work that ennoble rather than you grade the spirit of man [Music] where things of beauty are made sound devoid of built-in obsolescence timeless evolving free of the tyranny of tradition and the pressures of competition and commerce [Music] a friend of mine lived in Sausalito I went to see him and I said I need a job and he took me to heat ceramics that was in 1964 it's hard to describe just how much that building meant to me and still does it was it was like the ideal place to be working edith decided along with the architects of the Stoller and Bob Marquis I knew exactly where everything was going to be when you make a piece of clay work it's handled a minimum of 16 times so you want to have as little wasted space between one activity and the next one so I designed it as a sort of donut with a hole in the middle that was an interior patio with light coming in from all sides every employee had a window or natural life where they were working I enjoyed watching the boats coming in and out of Richards's Bale when I worked on this side of the building she told me once that wasn't by accident that there are humane workstations here at Keith's in fact she was so influential on that building she was able to put her name on the plan which was incredibly rare both big and small her work had that kind of integrity and I think that's why it still shines today there were I think 28 people working and at that point and he's existence 25 percent of our business was ashtrays the ashtray was one of the early pieces that they developed and the thing that made them very unique was the characteristic notch this would hold your cigarette so that it can continue to burn but then if it got to the edge of the ceramic the coolness of the ceramic would actually extinguish the ashtray so it's considered a safety feature Brian actually was the designer Edith was very specific and making sure that Brian got the credit for the ashtray and it really helped to create the Heath brand to people that may not have known who they were when I first came to the Heath Factory in early 70s Brian and Edith had an opening for a cup handler it was really wonderful working with Edith she was a natural teacher and she would get very excited about discovering new combinations or a surprising effect that she wasn't expecting and it was rather contagious and we worked on a lot of different projects she was definitely interested in the chemistry of glazes just being a naturally curious person most ceramicists are going to run into some sort of flaw or problem and you really need to be a detective to find out what it is what's causing the problem really helps if you know some glaze chemistry when we would come across a problem with a glaze she would have us mix the glaze first just the water in the vent night then the water bentonite in the clay and just adding one ingredient at a time in order to see what each ingredient was doing in the glaze and hopefully see where the problem suddenly shows up the glazing is a real critical part of the process enquires a lot of skill a spray gun is used to apply the glaze and the glaze needs to be applied very specifically at a certain weight and even at a certain speed some glazes need to be applied differently than others those the bottom of the piece with individual Glazer's mark everybody glaze a slightly different so sometimes it's kind of interesting you can see how glaze your plate we're making these and glazing by hand having some variation is okay but there's a standard that we're trying to hit often the piece is supposed to have an exposed edge and so we go back and scrape off that edge we also scrape the bottom foot on the plate so that it doesn't stick to the count shelf and when you turn up a plate you can kind of see that Edith really disdained clear shiny glazes her original idea was to get away from the bone china look and she wanted the the clay to interact with the glaze and become one thing she wasn't interested in having everything stamped out perfectly the same every time she loved the variation and I think that that was partly because Nature has more variation than machines she's very interested in the geology and volcanic interaction of glazes and would love it when you started to see some of the craters and blistering and the action of the fire on melting glass and stone [Music] [Music] I'm just really appreciating that tongue likes to work in a similarly inspiring way that Edith was working doing a lot of experimentation a shape is first sensed in the mind of the Potter it takes form in the working from the back of the mind it becomes reality for all to see to touch to feel to examine a shapeless bit of matter transformed to take its place in the world [Music] one of the things that made the architects and designers and the design world in general respect Edith was her design of the tile for the Norton Simon Art Museum it was a major project for which she won the AIA gold medal the only ceramicist ever to win that award Edith created a dual glaze process where she layered a red glaze over a black glaze and it created a kind of as Edith called it a kind of volcanic effect where the glazes mixed erupted she called it the ancestral magma it made waves all over the country she met a lot of resistance from the architects they said no we're not going to use that we can't and they finally ended up coming back to her because he just said I'm not going to change it this is what I'll make for you and if you don't want a thing you can go somewhere else and they came back it was a whole new palette for Edith to explore a whole new design an artistic palette because she could combine glazes she could do things that you can't do with tableware it opened up a lot of creative doors for her [Music] my very first job working for Edith Heath was painting the building this was 1973 she was opinionated about the way things worked if you were spreading concrete for example she would grab the rake out of your hand and say no not like that do it like this every now and then I talk out loud to someone about what I think revealing something of myself at the risk of being charged with being one of those female know-it-alls who's always right for the variant you have to be wrong sometimes as of living and thinking had more to do with right and wrong than with passionate creation it was difficult she was difficult for everybody who had a relationship whether it was nobody had an easy relationship with her but it was born out of frustration that this company that she had created was run by men the business end of it was run by man and that was the source of a lot of conflict between Brian and Edith Edith he had this thing about being a woman in a man's industrial world that she would speak about from time to time I'm certain many women do the same trying to explain to oneself the meaning of life theoretically free and emancipated but living in dread of an emasculating word or deed hey this is a pretty amazing model of someone who was able to gain recognition amidst a lot of barriers to women at the time looking back at her career and seeing the way that she had men running her business and option telling her what to do but she was still the strongest force at Heath ceramics is really key to understanding her place in history this friction that she had with her workers and her husband yielded a beautiful design I don't know how that happens but it did they saw lightning in a bottle I think either will be remembered in the future as a brilliant designer but if you dig a little deeper it was a geological fascination for her and it encompassed chemistry and thermodynamics she said someday we are going to be firing pottery with the energy from the Sun I mean it it really is visionary I mean that's a visionary thing to say you know after everything is glazed and prepared it's ready to be put in the kiln and fired we use more traditional gas kilns they fire at cone o - which is a very low firing temperature it makes it a very durable long-lasting piece that was Edith's design fired at a low temperature to save energy and also to produce a great range of color the higher temperature can burn out more color so we have all these incredible colors that were able to get because of the process I am as much an alchemist as I am a designer by reassembling minerals that have been dispersed through the face of the earth the Potter literally creates a metamorphosis from stone to stone the magic performed by heat and oxygen makes the minerals in the clay and glazed bubble and boil as molten lava to which they arc in changing and texture and varying in color with the length of the firing and the speed with which the fire cools the next day it's ready to be taken out of the kiln and still warm to the touch it's like the baked bread in the morning kind of exciting to see it's a 24-hour process if you bring up the temperature too fast it will crack if you bring down the temperature too fast it'll crack so it has to slowly go up to temperature be a temperature really for a short while and then you slowly decrease the temperature the last part of the process is to take all that product and and check it and see if it actually does match the design intent and the quality intent [Music] welcome the 1980s Edith for the first time faces major competition and that's what slows production down she has to compete with not just other larger facilities but now she has to compete with other countries other materials other trends clients we're changing to much cheaper and often less durable options of ceramic products that were shipping shipped from overseas and we're really affordable Heath was having a financial struggle along with that there were environmental constraints and that Brian anita's should have paid attention to long before they did glaze waste was going right out into the bay the EPA was informed of what was going on and they came in and said you can't do this anymore so on the one hand she wanted to protect the earth on the other hand she didn't like regulation telling her what to do she did not like waste she wanted materials to be used and reused one of the things she started doing which we're doing now the shelves that we use and the kilns Edith wanted to glaze those once they were no longer usable as kiln shelves and turn them into tile and now we're doing that she was very much an early environmentalist an average guard in this essay that Edith wrote when she was at the Chicago Teachers College in the early to mid 30s called my choice for president she really runs over he's interesting and kind of a had over time ideas about material use and land and being really interested in recycling material later in her career and trying to cut down on waste as much as possible throughout the entirety of Heath ceramics what I've been working on this Marty is trying to figure out what the model should be clay is being going to be used as structurally rather than as a facing [Applause] that's attendance and I don't want to check it doesn't work you see during the late 90s it was looking really grim for the business that Heath's had no succession plan in place Edith didn't want to look ahead at the future and didn't want to decide on what should happen to Heath ceramics we knew that there wasn't as enough money coming in to just pay everybody all the time on a regular basis and so that was really scary for the employees thinking that we might be out of a job we had to keep the company going and it required me especially to do things that were not in tune with what Edith wanted we had to advertise but I had to go out to Edith and Brian's home and take the page of the newspapers that have the ad in them so they wouldn't see that [Music] I thought I had suffered every frustration known every agony every doubt living with you all these years you were the playful one who suffered the doing of things just to be by my side to be with me your only purpose in life to please me what I now must learn a bitter truth that you are more important to me than anything else in the world I think Brian's death had a much greater impact on her than any of us would have expected because of the volatility of the relationship over the years but they were a team and so when Brian died I think Edith really did feel a emptiness and she built a kind of shrine in her fireplace from Brian's ashes for her to do that really showed how much she missed him and she she more and more withdrew into herself after Brian died there were a number of deals put forth to buy Heath from various people to give it an infusion of cash and promote the product Edith couldn't let go it would get to the point where the papers were to be signed and they wouldn't get aside and that happened time after time after time and I pretty much despaired that that was ever going to happen until Robin and Kathy came along in 2003 I ran across the factory and thought oh that's a weird that's the same name as that pottery that is from the mid-century I wonder if there's a connection the second we walked in we were in love with this place there was something different about it than anything else we had experienced and the people working there it was a labor of love we didn't know it was for sale just say well let's just go for it I like to let the material lead you so when you find a piece it has a curve like this and you want to find another curve to sort of then you could set up a movement to say we're moving from the final years of Edith's life it was hard to watch this brilliant woman and decline she did have dementia but she still had that energy and that drive that never ever went away to the day that she died it really I couldn't quite believe that this force of life was gone and as I said we all have difficult relationships with Edith but we all loved her ona in our own way and she loved us normally and when you talk about the history of design and the history of art it's a very male history and it's not often female we live in a time period right now where a lot of women artists a lot of women designers are finally getting the recognition that they deserve Edith came at that perfect moment in history in the perfect place and she found that opportunity and she went for it she was not only capable of doing all of the ceramic chemistry of it but she was capable of using that to do something that no one had done and drove home what ceramic industry could be in terms of sustainability energy efficiency and waste she broke with tradition and forged her own path it is what's more focused on creating than actually marketing or selling her products that that was where her love was was in refining and experimenting and making sure that her product was the best it could be it's not easy to distill down within design to those few things that resonate with people and when you hit on that the way Edith did it lasts forever whether you saw it in the sixties the seventies the eighties it was the it was Heath I mean you just knew what it was Heath where is a bit like the blues it's an American original its beauty is its simplicity but it's actually very difficult to pull it off well you know some things go in and out of fashion the idea of being grounded and being focused and being generous and being commune Oh will always be a value you know we should be so grateful that we live in this part of the world it's one of the most beautiful areas and we're so lucky that's the way that I feel about what's going to be the future of Heath ceramics it's brought me a great deal of pleasure and I lived in a beautiful part of the world and I've been able to do what I wanted to do [Music] this program was made possible in part by a grant from an r/a foundation a Margaret a Cargill philanthropy the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs the California humanities and the California Arts Council

Channel: KCET

Views: 23,804

Rating: 4.9680853 out of 5

Keywords: kcet, southern california, Artbound, art, culture, design, Heath Ceramics, Edith Heath, Nancy Silverton, dinnerware

Id: IJFM8Kui1W0

Length: 54min 58sec (3298 seconds)

Published: Thu May 23 2019