Charlie Collier is one of a small group of gifted traditional potters that has emerged in Britain in the last decade or so. When I say ‘traditional’, I mean in Charlie’s case working not only with the best of our native vernacular inheritance (from medieval times to the 19th century) but more recent influences on studio practice from beyond our shores, those of China, Korea and Japan in particular. Echoes too of earlier French and German wares. ‘Studio’ is another loaded term, appropriate now that Charlie is independently established, but he is particularly indebted to his time working as a thrower in a leading production workshop, part of a larger team making runs of garden pots for a big market, and where its demands and dictums provided the best training at the wheel. One where repetition of standard shapes, physical immersion, can instil a fluidity and rhythm that becomes almost subconscious over time. There is no better technical or mental basis for subsequent ‘individuality’, and Charlie brings a fresh and sensitive artistry to his craftsman’s knowledge.
Born in Oxford and raised nearby, Charlie became interested in pottery in his late teens, and began buying pieces, visiting potters and avidly reading about the subject. He was particularly attracted to the wheel and the pots that had come from the circle of Leach, Hamada and Cardew, and the great ceramic cultures they had drawn on. He was quickly seduced by the idea that you could find and process your own raw materials, developing clays, slips and glazes with a character unique to the potter, just as the subsequent firing event could add its own distinctive stamp. And then, after leaving college, Charlie was fortunate to join the aforementioned workshop, Jim and Dominique Keeling’s highly respected enterprise at Whichford in Warwickshire, spending seven years producing terracotta flowerpots, a long but necessary apprenticeship. It was a rare opportunity too, given the current paucity of serious throwing experience in potteries and college courses.
Charlie’s outlook was also broadened by his stimulating involvement with the Anagama Kiln Project based at Wytham Woods near Oxford, for him an enriching introduction to kiln-building and slow-burn wood firing. He was helping here at the time that Jim Keeling (a noted maker of wood-fired pieces) was contributing his expertise, as well as a group of potters from Bizen in Japan. Charlie fired some of his bigger pots at Wytham, having already set up a studio at home, exploring the territory of stoneware in his spare hours from Whichford, using an old electric kiln he had converted to gas. Given how much time he was already spending at the wheel, there was no questioning his commitment. Using Cornish clay, and locally sourced materials for glazes and slips, he was developing a number of ashes as well as chuns, celadons, shinos, nukas and irons. As he wrote at this time, “I aim for the qualities I seek in other people – warmth, generosity and most importantly life. It’s... just as much about feel as it is form and function”. He has often stressed the importance of form, of it being as integral as any technical skill. It is all about confident three-dimensional drawing, a sense of balance and integration, how to make all aspects of a pot work together. Charlie has also talked perceptively about the momentum of the wheel, of how it engenders a sense of flow: “the automatic feel of throwing is very endearing to me – the autopilot movements that your hands make, almost like a dance, when every move flows to the next until the whole board or trolley is full. It is a unique space to enter, and one I doubt I’ll ever tire of”.
His period at Whichford was supplemented by valuable time with other potters, including some weeks with Mike Dodd in Somerset, and gaining more firing proficiency with Tim Hurn in Dorset and Svend Bayer at Kigbeare, near Okehampton. Svend subsequently invited Charlie to join his Kigbeare Kiln Project, and early in 2020, the memorable period when Covid lockdown descended and Svend had his swan-song exhibition with Goldmark, Charlie moved to Devon. At Kigbeare, set remotely in a wooded valley on the periphery of Dartmoor, is a community of eight artists’ studios and a shared gallery. Here Svend and his team had built a large and now famous Anagama kiln, and it has allowed Charlie to wood-fire as well as continue with gas in his own workshop. At Kigbeare he continues to make a range of tablewares and individual pieces, one which comes with his sound philosophy that there is no real distinction between art and function, because as Charlie reminds us, pots are made to enhance, add life indeed, to our daily rites and routines, so labels and categories really become meaningless.
Thanks largely to Whichford, his throwing is consummate, as his large and assured wood-fired jars and jugs confirm with their almost indescribable tension between control and relaxation, movement and stillness. Qualities that give a good pot its lasting synergy.The big-bellied jars are clearly a worthy nod to Bayer, decorated with natural ashes and chuns, the shell imprints and fluid runs from firing adding depth and surface activity. They stand confidently as pieces of sculpture, strong expressions of the thrower’s art. When large in scale, the forms and earthy palettes work just as well outside, their hues and textures an extension of seasonal detail and coloration. Closely related in form are his lidded storage jars which show what an assured designer Charlie is. His lids and handles for example have a real precision, eminently practical, but also a decoration of form, made to just the right scale. There is this sense of balance too in his jugs, of which he has clearly made a particular study, given their variation. There are tall medieval-inspired baluster pieces, not dissimilar to Clive Bowen’s in shape, as well as squatter more bulbous types with thicker handles that echo potters like Bayer and Nic Collins, but have a special character of surface and detail that belongs to Charlie.
His handles are superb with their confidence of pulling and application, and one notices again how their design is adapted according to the general contours of each piece. The same with his various lips, the curve of the necks and so on. While some of the baluster jugs veritably glory in their swathes of trickling fly-ash, other particularly graceful types have a more reflective tenmoku glaze that enhances their modern elegance, underlining what a succinct maker Charlie is, one who eschews unnecessary embellishments that many makers find so tempting. He avoids brushwork and engraving and only occasionally finger-swipes. Much of the strength of this work is its underlying Englishness, not only to do with his palette and chosen integration of sources, but a sense of quiet study and observation that stops it becoming too involved in historical and Far Eastern derivation, though the antecedents are always felt. His restraint is a matter of knowing where to stop, of sensing when the pot is made.
The faceted vases and lidded jars, broadly cut-sided up to their shoulder (the head of the pot often defined by a separate glaze), he certainly makes his own. Dare I say it, but they are probably more resolved as shapes than some other potters’ attempts at this design. Something to do with the integration and depth of the cutting at the neck? The best of his broadly flaring chun-covered bowls have that Leachian sense of the ‘Song Standard’ being sought, but they have an attention to throwing, turning and glazing that again is special to the potter, and with a vigour so missing in ceramics that only pursue a perfect technique. As Charlie has observed, “there is an underlying sense of proportion in all of us”, and his tea bowls offer an excellent insight into its subtle variations, both broader and widening, or narrowing inwards, towards the lip. Others are simply straight-sided, cylindrical. Again we see how glazing and firing incidents create an innate sense of shift in supposedly static objects, a stirring in quiescence.
The college-trained potter (and master-thrower) Colin Pearson once told me, in paying tribute to his crucial student interlude in a Cotswold production pottery, that “there is a little bit of Winchcombe in all I do”. And indeed even his most sculptural vessels had their foundation in this very practical and rooted time. Charlie naturally acknowledges his own workshop pedigree in all his work, but perhaps we see it most movingly in the groups of small elegant waisted bottles, glazed or un-glazed, some rewardingly affected by rivulets of fly-ash. Each has its own personality of colour and texture, but the shape and scale is uniform, born out of creative continuum, an evolving process which refines both the potter’s hand and eye, and indeed our own appreciation of what makes a good pot so lastingly potent. With insightful young makers like Charlie Collier around, one feels the future of this clearly regenerative craft is assured.
David Whiting is an art critic and curator, with specialist expertise in contemporary ceramics, a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and member of the International Association of Art Critics.