Few potters are as revered within the community as Jim Malone. Join us for an impromptu exhibition of some of the Cumbria-based maker’s very best pots.
With nearly 45 years’ experience behind him since setting up his first studio in 1976, Jim Malone has firmly established his place in the pantheon of great British potters. A veteran thrower in the mould of Bernard Leach, Michael Cardew, and Bill Marshall, Malone has enlivened the Anglo-Oriental pottery tradition with his expressive, functional wares.
Avoiding what Cardew called the ‘deliberately willed injection of personality’, he has always aimed instead for openness in every process: ‘What I have tried to do is create an environment in which the kind of pots that I want to produce can happen, because you can’t contrive it, you can’t make them happen; you have to let them happen.’
The evolution of Malone’s pots has been gradual, almost subconscious. Working within a repertoire of historical forms – 13th century Chinese, 16th century Korean – he has slowly but surely refined each silhouette, removing all that is unnecessary or inelegant. Round-bellied Korean bottles and black Tenmoku vases, draped in copper pours, sit side by side with medieval-style jugs and ash-glazed mixing bowls, demonstrating Malone’s supreme skill on his Korean-style kick-wheel as well as the breadth of influence in his work.
The pots in this exhibition – at once robust and graceful, intimate and universal – have been hand-picked by the Goldmark pot department. Represented is the culmination of Malone’s five decades of throwing with an ever-watchful eye, looking and responding to the shaping of the clay, striving to give his materials the clarity of their own voice.
