Ben Owen III
A Profile
Article by Charlotte Vestal Brown
Melon Egg Bases. 2004. Copper penny glaze, woodfired for four days in multi-chambered kiln. 12.5, 20, 28 cm/h. Private collection. Photo by Juan Villa.
B
EN OWEN III (B. 1968) HAS MADE POTTERY FOR SALE
since he was 13 years old at the site where his grandfather and father established the Old Plank Road Pottery in the Seagrove area of Piedmont North Carolina in 1959. He worked at the wheel during high school and in the early 1980s while in college. He pro-
duced work in the shapes, glazes and traditions of his grandfather. As he grew older and more experienced he travelled in the US attending workshops and conferences. He also travelled abroad, to Japan, Australia, New Zealand and to Europe and recently to China where he enlarged his experience while work-
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Sung Jar. 2004. Stoneware, copper penny glaze, woodfired for four days in multi-chambered kiln. 86 x 45.5 x 45.5 cm.Collection of the artist, photo by David Ramsey.
Edo Jar. 2005. Woodfired stoneware, natural ash glaze. 40.5 x 20 cm. Collection of the artist.
ing and visiting with local potters. Owen’s is an exemplary story of a traditional craftsman who has successfully folded his academic training into his working life. From the beginning Owen’s work has exhibited a noteworthy consistency. He is blessed with an abundance of talent and the well of his grandfather’s remarkable career, first as the master potter of Jugtown then as his own master at Plank Road. Ben Senior’s understanding of form and his knowledge of ceramic production originated in experience and fostered personal aesthetic values that have acted both as a challenge and a resource for Ben III. He has worked at the edge of this inherited aesthetic while a maturing personal vision has enabled him to excavate deeper and reach wider, all the while creating work that has been and is characterised by a pure simplicity of form and a personal glaze palette. His pieces exhibit a sure sense of proportion, of a proper and sound relationship of height to width and breadth that settles his pieces around a powerful fulcrum. The glazes that he has developed have an inevitability about them – that is each colour seems rigorously
matched to the form. The results are objects of harmony and elegance whose near perfect relationships can only be described as classic. Ben III was able to translate the knowledge and experience he had gained in his youth into a richly experimental period during and after college. He eschewed the traditional clays and colours of the Owen tradition and worked at creating new forms like the ribbed and lobbed vessels that took their inspiration from the cantaloupes and pumpkins of his family’s garden. He turned to porcelain and other prepared clays, carving and combing the surfaces. He substituted different handles and lids for the more familiar ones from the traditional repertoire. He experimented with prepared colours that were sometimes applied by spraying as well as dipping. The intense oxblood or copper reds that he used for some of his forms, like the Chinese Blue or Jun wares of 13th century China and the salt-glazes that clung to his clay bodies, intensified the near perfectly proportioned shapes that he repeatedly threw at his wheel. The forms themselves also started to grow in scale.
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Chinese Red Egg Vase. 2000. Earthenware, oxidation lead glaze, copper red glaze. 71 x 38 cm. Collection of the Gregg Museum of Art & Design, NCSU. Gift of Louise Talley and family. Photo by David Ramsey.
T’ang Vase. 2007. Porcelain, Chinese blue glaze, wood fired, multiple firings. 81 x 43 x 43 cm. Collection of the Umstead Hotel, Cary, North Carolina. Photo by the artist.
Lacking neither confidence nor skill Owen nevertheless has moved patiently. When he made this hugely overscaled egg vase that he glazed in a dense, flowing bright red he clearly had attained a kind of apogee for his work in the language developed by his grandfather. This attainment did not last long because it did not represent the aesthetic ideal that has always driven him. Owen’s aesthetic is derived from that of his grandfather and from the traditions that have long characterised the diverse pottery producing community in the Seagrove area. Ben Sr’s aesthetic was rooted in the use of local clays and woodfiring in a ground hog kiln that had been habitual at least since the early 19th century. Lead and salt were the means for glazing as well as decorating the wares. The pragmatic need to constantly produce useful wares was the backbone of the local pottery business. Ben Owen Sr along with a few other potters introduced “artware” to the area in the 1920s. The elder Owen’s particular production was the consequence of his talent, skill and long-lived relationship with Juliana and Jacques Busbee, who introduced him to Japanese Edo style pottery and
Han, Song and T’ang as well as Korean wares. The Busbees appreciated the simplicity of these forms and their early Asian glazes and these were a near perfect match for the capacities and proclivities of Ben Sr’s pottery making experience and the plain, undecorated functional wares then found in the area. The result was, of course, the justly famous Jugtown wares that Ben Sr produced and whose forms he refined over the years between 1925 – 1959. These wares and practices are Ben III’s legacy. Ben III absorbed that legacy and drew on it in his search for his particular voice and ‘voice’, of course, was his grandfather’s most profound gift. His grandfather and his family taught him to value his personal vision and to adhere to that internal vision. This enabled him to learn and to evolve as a potter without loosing his confidence. Over the past 10 years his work has never lost the strong threads of classical restraint and formal focus that comes from making a limited number of individually unique forms with increasing understanding and refinement just as his grandfather had done. The vessel has been Owen’s talisman.
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Working at this scale has always been demanding and Owen has experimented systematically to minimisze and control the opportunities for failure. Clay has been a major consideration and now, coming full circle, he uses a mixture of local clays that have historically been exciting to him and his local colleagues who have learnt the clays’s properties. He acquires and prepares two Mitchfield clays, local stoneware clays named for their place of origin, and available nearby. His forefathers used these to create the distinctive salt-glaze finishes. He also digs a primarily kaolin type clay near Candor that is 20 miles south of the studio, and another local secondary kaolin from Cameron (also nearby) that is sticky and is the glue that holds all the other clays together. A filter press allows Owen to prepare 300 pounds of clay in about six to eight hours. A new addition to his studio was designed to include sheltered bins that can store 30 tonnes of each of the newly dug clays until each is ready to be ground to a powder and prepared for throwing. Owen uses his woodfired kiln to produce his large pieces but he also has had to deal with the inherent dangers of cracking in the large greenware vessels. The traditional answer has been to bisque fire to temper the work but it is difficult to complete this process in a wood kiln with much success. He has Sung Jar. 2007. Porcelain, Patina Green glaze, woodfired. 71 x 38 x 38 cm. now installed a gas-fired car kiln Collection of the artist, photo by the artist. for bisque firing that will accept a piece up to 51 centimetres in diamHe has made vessels in hundreds of variations, in eter. The culmination of the process remains, howmany colours and surfaces and sizes. The other ever, wood firing. guiding principle has been constant and thoughtful At the same time, wood firing has come back into experimentation with clays, glazes and firing. Ben favour because of its rich potential for creating III never stopped using his grandfather’s woodfired dynamic surfaces on the ware that is subjected to the ground hog kiln. The discipline of fire and wood vagaries of the kiln. Once salt and the accidents of kiln and, at times, salt have led him to a new level of drips and kisses were the widely recognised results of attainment producing powerful and expressive that process. Now Owen, like a number of other potlarge thrown vessels that can demand and be comters in the area, continue to test the limits of clay and fortable in corporate and public spaces where they heat, firing for long periods from 24 hours to four exude a classical serenity derived from the vital days, allowing the kiln to heat slowly, attain high temglowing colours and inherited life embedded in peratures and an accumulation of wood ash, and then Owen’s process. to cool down slowly, permitting the ash runs to
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become the dominant decoration on a piece or such as his new copper green glaze, to permit a crystalline surface to grow. This combination of production strategies has enabled Owen to make the work that is now being sought for hotels, such as The Umstead in Research Triangle Park in North Carolina and the Ritz Carlton, Tokyo. Both locations have used his large pieces to introduce serenity and elegance that is carried by his work as a consequence of his talent, his carefully reasoned processes and 25 years of experience with clay. At the heart of Owen’s work, however, has been his ability to keep a firm hold on the direction of his work. Whether large or small his best work represents a near perfect marriage of form and colour, of surface and the adherence of the chosen glaze to the dense, earthy body that lies underneath. The work has a timeless quality and a resilient beauty that epitomises his grandfather’s legacy. No voice speaks any louder or with more warmth and authority about the nature of clay and its properties. The complex process that results in the work is always his own. Nature, whether in the local clays he chooses or the fire and air that meet in his kilns over the work gives the vessels their life. This energy also challenges death. These forms originate in the earth and hold these polar oppoGenie Bottles. 2006. . Stoneware, natural ash glaze, woodfired. 71 x 35.5 cm sites in near perfect balance. One Collection of the Umstead Hotel, Cary, NC. Photo by the artist. experiences a profound pleasure that is derived from the balance between the elegant surfaces and the powerful forms peach and yellow that the intense blue/green triggers that support halos and sunbursts, smouldering colin the eye, the motion of a shifting surface stimulates a ours and crackles and, in the latest vessels, tiny pits different kind of reaction and a new idea forms. These where crystals seem to erode the clay. vessels are matte and the surfaces intensely tactile, In these latest vessels, the new copper green crysendowing the forms with a presence that breaks talline works, Ben Owen III is throwing out a chaldown the distance between the object and the viewer, lenge to his own vision. These crystals have the interrupting the traditional serenity and balance of potential to distract from the formal clarity of the vesthe forms. It will be immensely exciting to see where sel’s surfaces, characteristics that have always been a these large vessels and new surfaces lead this potter hallmark of Owen’s work. These crystals appear to or, more accurately, where he pushes them. pit the pristine surface and thus the tightly articulated profile of the form itself. While the colour is absoCharlotte Vestal Brown, Hon AIA is the Director of Gregg Museum of Art & Design, NCSU. lutely delicious; cool and warm at once with hints of
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