Nick Chapman

The Arcanist

As an eager young man in the early 1970s, it used to mystify me when I arrived to take another ill paid job in yet another unremarkable potter's workshop only to find hopelessly illogical and often ineffective working methods in use. The explanation was always the same, 'that's the way I have always done it'. I wanted to get in there and turn things upside down, shake things up and breathe new life into the place. Of course, I didn't last long, seldom more than 6 months, before moving on to my next victim. Now, as a middle aged, unremarkable potter myself, I find that I am probably the worst specimen of the 'that's the way I have always done it' mindset. Take my glaze for example. It contains masses of clay, I initially intended it as a raw glaze, with none of it calcined, and I developed it at Harrow Art School shortly before leaving in 1976. I had begun to make earthenware, inspired by a jug I had seen at an exhibition. It had a rich, dark, honey-coloured glaze with tiny metallic flecks floating just beneath the surface. It was so beautifully made, wafer-thin yet with a full, rounded belly, I picked it up and felt almost as if I was holding a balloon in my hands. A couple of years before, Michael Cardew had told me of a young potter just starting up in North Devon and suggested that I should try to get a job with him, now that I held one of his pots I saw why. This jug had been made by Clive Bowen, a thoroughly remarkable potter, for whom I eventually worked after leaving Harrow. When I set up my own workshop, two years later, I also made raw-glazed, woodfired earthenware but gave this up for biscuit firing and an electric kiln after several years of heartbreaking firing losses. When I started biscuit firing, rather than risk changing my glaze for something more suitable, I stuck with the old one, calcining half of the clay content to stop it from peeling off the pot before it reached the kiln. The only other change from the 1976 recipe was to substitute Calcium Borate frit for Colemanite after some problems with a bad bag of the stuff.

Devon clay
I began by using Fremington clay. I used to buy it from Brannams' Pottery in Barnstaple when they were still working in a splendidly Dickensian building with an ancient bottle kiln. This clay is, I believe, a geological oddity. It is not related to any of the surrounding soils and it is thought that a glacier picked it up elsewhere and that it floated to Devon in a giant iceberg. When it came to rest, at the end of one of the ice ages, the iceberg melted and deposited its cargo of wonderful, rich, creamy textured red clay, this was to become the source material for North Devon's noble tradition of pottery making. It might be a fanciful story but I think it's a good one. When the clay is first dug it is not workable and needs two years to mature, not all the clay from the pit, however, is good, there is the dreaded 'horseflesh' which looks just like regular clay but its name speaks for itself. Unfortunately, two years of weathering did nothing for the batch of horseflesh accidentally dug in the early 1980s. Regular customers were able to get their Fremington clay by the back door, but not me, I was a new customer and I would have to find my clay somewhere else whilst a newly dug batch matured.

I have been using Spencroft 'Green dot' Red clay ever since, this is in spite of the fact that Fremington clay, a far superior and totally reliable material has, for the last 20 years, been available from Brannams' new site, just opposite my local Sainsburys. But I have come to know where I am with Spencroft, for all its flaws. I used to mix grog or sand with it for making big pots, a laborious job with no pugmill, and was rewarded with very severe crazing. Nowadays, I take turnings from my wheeltray, dry them, grind them up with a hand-operated meat mincer, grade them with a sieve and biscuit fire them. Then I wash all the dust out, add the resulting grog to my slops and dry this until I can wedge it up with some ungrogged clay until it looks right. An unbelievably laborious job but, because the grog is of the same composition as the clay, I suffer no crazing. If I had witnessed this practice as a teenager with all the answers, it would have made me weep. Fortunately there are no such youths to disturb my equilibrium and drag me from my arcane methods. If there were, I would never be able to get away with my white slip recipe and its mode of application.

When I was using Fremington clay my white slip of Hiplas 71 ball clay was fine. Fremington can absorb almost any amount of water and retain its shape, but dip a pot made from Spencroft into any thickness of slip and it just collapses or its handle falls off. Most likely the handle would land on, and so ruin, the one pot that had miraculously survived the slipping. I have written dire warnings on my slip bucket that its pint weight (measured with a beer glass and kitchen scales) must not exceed 670gms/pint. The resulting slip is so thin that it hardly shows and a second coat is needed, both inside and out. Four separately applied coats of white slip with drying time in between, plus one first coat of black slip that I brush onto the raw clay to give a broken texture. It has to be mad. I swear I will do something about this crazy practice almost every time I open the slip bucket, and I have been doing so for years.

Decorating
One day, around 1980, the farmer I rented my workshop from asked me if I would make him a chamber pot for his brother in law's birthday. He wanted it to have an eye painted inside with a vaguely smutty verse. I needed the money and this was how I started making pottery painted with colours on a white background. I turned to Bernard Leach's A Potters Book for help with a pigment and got the grey/blue that I use to this day. It was sufficient for the eye but the next commission from my landlord involved daffodils. I tried everything in the books for a yellow, even persuading a reluctant materials supplier to open his metal drum marked 'danger, radioactive material' and sell me a paper bag full of depleted uranium. All this did was yield a dirty brown and scare me witless every time I saw the bag in my cupboard for years to come. I eventually found that there is a good prepared underglaze yellow that doesn't glow in the dark. The green I use is very 'painty' and dry on its own, I always modify it with either blue or copper green painted on top, both of these colours run a little, giving the green a more fluid look.

The eye in the chamber pot was well received and I have used the same method of decoration ever since. I draw an outline by engraving, with a sharpened needle file, through the white slip into the dark clay beneath. I colour this in, biscuit fire at 950°C and finish with a clear glaze. To begin with I was drawing things that were essentially naïve, fun or exotic. With a young family at home, my head was full of illustrations from our children's books and comics, although I had very little drawing experience, I depicted tigers, monkeys and parrots, my 'Desperate Dan' shaving dish was a hot seller. I added lustres to my insect wings and fine gold banding on the rims. When our children grew up, my pots (and our house) became quieter, more grown-up. Although I have occasional lapses, I have always made tableware. I love the intimacy that grows with a favourite mug or bowl, our kitchen is full of such favourites. A good pot can give me far more pleasure when I cup it in my hands, feel its warmth and raise it to my lips than any object on a plinth can, no matter how intellectually challenging, new or surprising it might be.

Current work
I live in North Devon with my wife, Charmian Harris, a jeweller working with gold, opal and other beautiful stones. We met at a time when Charmian was also a potter and we both worked for Clive Bowen. My workshop is at the end of the garden, a timber building with lots of light and a simple layout of wooden benches on either side. The only machinery is a Fitzwilliam wheel that I built at college, a big old motorcycle and my kiln. It may be a heresy for a potter to admit, it may be because my workshop is built from wood, but I am quite scared of fire. Perhaps it is because I blew up a college gas kiln? In order to gently preheat a firing I had lit one burner; having foolishly neglected to remove the chimmney damper it promptly went out and the kiln started to fill with gas. An hour later, when I returned with a lighted match to ignite a second burner, the resulting explosion blew the entire roof out of the kiln and bent some hefty metalwork. Witnesses reported seeing the spyhole bungs shoot from their sockets like bullets whilst I cowered in a corner, a hail of shattered brick and vermiculite raining down on me. To be safe, I now use a small toploading electric kiln with an electronic controller. Before I leave my workshop in the evening, I push a button and in the morning the firing is all over. I put such a lot of time into my pots and build such a close relationship with them in the making process that I don't want unpredictable effects to be added by the firing.

I am happy not making a great deal of pottery and I am often hard pressed for an answer when people ask me where I sell. I enjoy playing with new ideas and techniques; I have been working with Charmian recently, experimenting with lost-wax gold casting for her jewellery, I do all of our photography, publicity and web design, there is such a lot to learn and it all takes time. I am going to be making some pots in porcelain with cast gold additions soon, it will be fun but I expect to return to tableware, pottery which improves with the passage of time, use and love. I just hope the new gas kiln I have ordered for firing porcelain has a flame failure device.

Arcanist…'one having knowledge of a secret ceramic process'
Chambers 20th Century Dictionary