OXFORD CERAMICS GALLERY
SUT TON TAYLOR
SUT TON TAYLOR Sutton Taylor has a box that has travelled from one studio to the next, for the last thirty years. Sealed within it are all the most poisonous chemicals that he had collected on his early transit through the lustre maker’s laboratory. He had vowed not to open it until he was seventy, when he would not be so concerned about the toxic cargo as much as a younger man may be; now Pandora’s box lies tantalisingly close to temptation. Johannes Faust was the great alchemist of myth, and depictions of his alembics and retorts are not more mysterious, nor free from temptation, than the world of lustre making. Anyone who has attempted the technique will know just how elusive are the results, and what might be the deals one might make to An achieve them.Taylor’s is not just an arcane tradition, for he is an empiricist; he walks - he watches the weather, the sea, the landscape. It is the nuances of reflections, the glistening of sun on the water, the depths of a rock pool that inform the surfaces of his vessels. His response to Nature is through the making of pots, which carry both the humble associations of the domestic, as well as the opulence of the court ceramics. His is a style of making that apparently belongs to a long tradition of lustre-ware, and indeed his work features significantly in the books on the subject, but actually it defies classification. He is largely self-taught. There was clearly an early moment in the process that involved the capture of the fleeting seduction of a flash of gold in raku firing, the awareness of the techniques of Persian and Syrian potters and then endless experimentation. It is work that is aware of tradition without being a part of it. For him improvisation is the key to success: there is no firing technique that involves more moments of danger than lustre firing, so risk-taking becomes a necessary modus vivendi. Firstly the body of the vessel is not just a conventional clay; Taylor mixes frit (the glassy glaze-like material) into the locally sourced Doble’s clay dug from the clay beds at con St. Agnes.This added flux and silica creates a sintered body, which enhances lustre development, but it also makes the piece more likely to crack on cooling. Since each piece is fired four to six times, the loss-rate can be significant. The (al)chemical processes take place in a red-hot kiln - it is a closed box. To discover what is happening inside draw-rings’ (made of the same clay body) are removed at intervals as the lustre develops in the smoky reduction atmosphere; but when the draw-ring shows perfect lustre development then that is too late to stop the firing and it will over-cook the ingredients and need to be re-fired. For the manufacture of lustre, the chemicals supplied in the twenty-first century are refined and like most contemporary potters he uses them, but the land furnishes not only the inspiration for the work, but also inspires the glaze, through addition of impure materials, collected on walks through the ancient Cornish countryside. Carrying a rucksack and hammer, after a storm has broken open ancient seams, the geology is revealed - the source of unrefined minerals to be gleaned from the rock faces. Prospecting on the beach can reveal copper sulphate crystals; a visit to the industrial past provides arsenic-impregnated sludge from old mine workings. These are traces that would have guided Bronze Age smiths and traders to mineral deposits of copper, tin, alluvial gold, and indeed uranium. They deliver an unpredictable range of colour, that takes the audience back to ancient times, through the medieval ‘mysteries’ of the craft guilds and the discoveries of the Middle-Eastern potters, described by Piccolpasso. Thus the work takes us into a world of seduction and beauty, that also returns us to a rare contact with pre-history, a brush with a world where magic and transmutation were regarded as commonplace. Sutton Taylor’s ultimate goal was never the Philosopher’s Stone, whe but the next stage in the individuation is perhaps at hand; maybe now is the time to open the box. David Jones
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3 Front cover ST5 above ST18
4 Top to bottom ST10, ST3, ST19, vases left to right ST21, ST24, ST22, bottom ST5
Bernard Leach BL16 Early Slipware Plate, c1923
5 Above ST18
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Bernard Leach BL02 Tenmoku Vase, c1960s
SUT TONTAYLOR Solo Exhibitions (since 1994) 2013 Oxford Ceramics Gallery, Oxford 2010 Hart Gallery. London 2008 Hart Gallery, London Millennium Gallery, Cornwall 2007 Summer Exhibition, Hart Gallery, Nottingham Lemon Street Gallery, Truro St 2006 Hart Gallery, London 2005 The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh 2004 Hart Gallery, London 2001 Hart Gallery, London and South West Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh 1999 Leeds University Art Gallery Hart Ha Gallery, London 1998 The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh 1997 Runningridge Gallery, Santa Fe, USA 1996 Scarborough Art Gallery and Museum Hart Gallery, London 1995 The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh Hart Gallery, London 1994 Oxford Gallery, Oxford Public collections include: Crafts Council, London UK Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery UK (loan from Keatley Trust) Melbourne Museum, Australia Brighton and Hove Museums Craft Collection UK Los Angeles County Museum, Los Angeles USA Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge UK Glasgow Art Gallery UK Musee de Vallauris, France Victoria and Albert Museum, London UK Alhambra Museum, Granada, Spain Ashmolean Museum, Oxford UK
Published by Oxford Ceramics Ltd. ©Oxford Ceramics Ltd. 2013 Oxfo Oxford Ceramics Gallery, 29 Walton Street, Oxford, Oxfordshire OX26AA www.oxfordceramics.com tel: (+44) 01865 512320 Introduction ©David Jones 2013 Photography & Design ©Michael Harris
7 Opposite page ST23, this page top to bottom ST7, ST24, ST17
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