Jim Malone
goldmark
Price £10
Jim Malone
Jim Malone Celebrating Malone at 70 and 40 years a potter
Max Waterhouse Ray Pearson
goldmark 2016
130. Baluster Jug Three pellets. Salt glaze 21 x 13.5 cm
131. Baluster Jug Three pellets. Salt glaze 17 x 12.5 cm
Jim Malone by Max Waterhouse Rivers are born slowly. At first a trickling stream, babbling over pebbles and earth, with time the water runs a stronger, more purposeful current, smoothing out its banks, deepening its channel, rolling away all obstacles obstructing its flow. As the years pass by it follows an evermore-assured course until it has curved and carved its way through the landscape, dragging away detritus and bringing with it precious life. So too with the work of Jim Malone. A potter now of 40 years’ experience since setting up his first studio in 1976, the evolution of his pots has been gradual, almost subconscious. Working within a repertoire of historical, functional forms - 13th century Chinese, 16th century Korean - he has slowly but surely refined each silhouette, removing all that is unnecessary and inelegant. The resulting work may appear simple; in reality, it is the culmination of some four decades of throwing with an ever-watchful eye, looking and responding to the shaping of the clay, striving to give his material the clarity of its own voice. In this exhibition – Malone’s third at the Goldmark Gallery – the experience drawn from those years spent at the kick-wheel is clear to see. Round-bellied Korean bottles and Tenmoku vases, draped in copper pours,
7
110. Tall Bottle Porcelain. Cobalt fish drawing 45 x 17 cm
sit side by side with medieval-style jugs and ash-glazed mixing bowls, demonstrating Malone’s supreme ability as a thrower as well as the breadth of influence in his work. Two tall porcelain bottles, proudly sporting their leaping fish designs, belie the slippery nature of this type of clay. Porcelain is a notoriously rebellious material; to have achieved such height and conviction of form as Malone has here is no mean ceramic feat. Despite evidencing Malone’s obvious ability as a potter, however, the work in this exhibition seldom shows off. In his introduction to The Unknown Craftsman, the seminal text by the critic Soetsu Yanagi, the great maker Bernard Leach recalls the words of his friend discussing the role of the artist-craftsman: Take heed of the humble; be what you are by birthright; there is no room for arrogance. Too many makers, Yanagi felt, were ‘overproud’ of their individualism: their work had become an imposition of character, in which expression of the self superseded all other things. It is a difficulty of which Malone has always been acutely aware, avoiding what Michael Cardew termed the deliberately willed injection of personality and aiming 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 pots of this exhibition are works of great humility, showing deference to the elemental materials of which they are composed and through which they were formed. In their restraint and their
8