Glenfiddich Farm Pottery

Phil Rogers: Emergence of a Master
 

(from Ceramics Monthly, May 2003)
By Richard Busch

Pulling into the parking area at Marston pottery in mid-Wales, located in the countryside near the charming old village of Rhayader, I receive an enthusiastic greeting from the canine welcoming committee. They are Libby and Tess, a pair of four-year-old border collies—tails wagging, ears and tongues flapping—who seem overjoyed by my arrival. Their reception, I soon realize, couldn't be a more appropriate introduction to this place, reflecting as they do the friendliness, warmth, and informality of their owners—Phil Rogers and his wife, Lynn.

The property itself also fits the ideal image of a rural pottery. It's a 700-year-old farmstead nestled in a bucolic valley close to the River Wye, with expansive views of rolling hills and pastures dotted with sheep. The farmhouse, with its low ceilings, hand-hewn beams, and wonky floors fairly oozes Old World charm. Several handsome stone outbuildings house the workshop, kilns, and a pair of showrooms. It's the kind of setting that many modern potters can only dream of, though historically the kind of place where potters have lived and worked for centuries.

My visit here comes at an important time in Phil Rogers' 25-year career. Though for years a potter with an international reputation, his stature has recently ascended to even loftier heights. Part of the reason is his relatively recent association with the prestigious Pucker Gallery in Boston, the same gallery that represents the work of two of the world's most famous names in pottery—Brother Thomas, the American, and Tatsuzo Shimaoka, Shoji Hamada's former assistant who later become one of a small number of Japan's elite Living National Treasures.

Rogers' first one-man Pucker show, held in 2001— presenting a mix of reduction-fired and salt-fired pots—was a resounding success, bringing his work to the attention of an expanded group of collectors and resulting in numerous purchases—among them several by major museums in the US, including The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Minneapolis Museum of Art, Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, and the Sackler Museum at Harvard University. Says owner Bernie Pucker, "Phil's pottery has a fresh intelligence and spirit of its own. Potters, collectors, gallery visitors, all fell in love with the directness and delicacy of his work." Not only did the show result in numerous sales, it elevated his prices significantly, with large vases going for thousands of dollars. That success led to his second one-man show this January, which outsold the first.

Rogers’ audience has also grown as a result of his three books. His latest, Salt Glazes, released just last fall, has been highly acclaimed both in Britain and in America. Two previous books, Ash Glazes (1992) and Throwing Pots (1995) are still widely read, and the former, which has been completely revised, with all new photographs, will be republished in the spring of 2003.

Salt Glazes is the logical extension of Rogers' deep interest in salt glazing during the last decade. It’s a comprehensive, well-written survey of the history and practice of salt firing, loaded with excellent photographs and with informative profiles of 25 salt- or soda-firing potters and how they work.

Of course, the Phil Rogers success story didn't happen overnight. In fact, his resumé, which goes back to the 1970s, includes many impressive credentials, among them:
 

•Some 30 one-man shows including the Harlequin Gallery and the Contemporary Ceramcis gallery, both in London, and The Tho Art Space in Seoul, South Korea.

•Conductor of countless workshops in the US, Canada, Korea, Ethiopia, South Africa, Malta, and the UK.

•Fellow and past Chair of the Craft Potters Association of Great Britain, member of the International Academy of Ceramics, director of the Festival of International Ceramics held every two years at Aberystwyth in Wales.

•And numerous awards, prizes, articles, and other accomplishments, too many to mention here.

Rogers' work is firmly entrenched in what may be called, for lack of a better description, the Bernard Leach-Shoji Hamada tradition, an esthetic fusion of medieval English and ancient Oriental pottery distinguished by its simplicity, straightforwardness, and its quiet, unassuming beauty. He relies mainly on such basic decorative techniques as incising, impressing, faceting, and fluting. And as potters have done for centuries, he uses locally gathered materials—clay, stone, and wood ash. To his great benefit, an encyclopedic knowledge of throwing and firing techniques, and of glaze chemistry—the result of decades of study and experimentation—gives him a deep understanding of the materials and what can be done with them, so that his work flows confidently, fluidly, naturally.

And yet, with all his experience and accomplishments, and despite the rapidly growing audience of enthusiasts who collect his work, and the influences he has had on legions of other potters, Rogers is disarmingly modest when talking about his craft and his intensions.

"I am just a potter who makes pots the best way I can," he says with typical modesty, which can sometimes seem a little incongruous considering his larger-than-life, six-foot, seven-inch physique. "I am not making social or political statements. Rather, I am trying, sometimes successfully and other times not, to provide pot-loving people with work that has beauty, grace, and function, while at the same time furthering a tradition that I am happy and comfortable to be a part of. The challenge for me is to find my own way along a narrow path, to seek creatively that variation and nuance that distinguish my pots from the work of another."

The story of how the Phil Rogers career developed is both interesting and instructive. Born in Newport, South Wales, in 1951, he didn't discover clay until 1971 when he went to the Swansea School of Art. By then he and Lynn had married, and their daughter, Claire, was born. The responsibilities of supporting a family led him at first to focus on a career teaching art. As it happened, the program included an introductory course in throwing. It was just a basic class, but the experience encouraged him to work on his own to develop his skills. After graduation, a job teaching painting and drawing opened up in Cambridgeshire, England, and then, as luck would have it, a year later, in 1974, he learned about another school nearby that was looking for someone to teach pottery.

He got the job.

"I didn't know much at the time," he recalls, "so I had to learn fast just to keep one step ahead of the students. I bought a wheel and an electric kiln and practiced at home. Also, coincidentally, there happened to be a shop in town that sold good pots—by people like Walter Keeler, Ray Finch, Richard Batterham, and Katherine Pleydell-Bouverie—so I'd go there often and try to figure out how, say, Finch made his teapot, the way the lid fitted, or how he made the spout, and then I'd go home and see if I could make one the same way just to learn the technique. Those people were my absentee tutors."

In 1976, he spent the summer working at a pottery a few miles from where he and Lynn were living. It was owned by a fellow named Nicholas Edison-Giles. "I didn't get paid,” he recalls. “But I did get a taste of what it was like to work for yourself.

"At the time, I was also strongly influenced by Bernard Leach's A Potter's Book. In the back part of the book he describes the day-to-day running of a pottery workshop. It's an idealized account of this kind of cozy place where you make what you please, and it just painted a nice rosy picture of how it could be. And I must say, in retrospect, that it's absolutely true. The last twenty-odd years have convinced me that being your own boss is one of the major advantages of being a potter."

The experience working at Edison-Giles, coupled with the lure of working for himself, coincided with a growing feeling of frustration with the staff-room politics of teaching. And so, by the following year he had made his decision. He and Lynn moved to Rhayader, where his family had roots going back generations. They moved into a small cottage owned by his mother, and in 1978 opened a pottery in town. It was small and cramped, and the kiln was some 500 yards away, in their cottage garden, which meant carrying pots through town to be fired. But it was a start.

Later, with a government grant and some fancy footwork convincing several lenders to advance him a sizable chunk of money, he was able to purchase the farm. After nine months of hard work, the studio was operable, a 75-cubic-foot oil kiln was built, a showroom set up, and Marston Pottery was open for business.

The early years were a struggle financially, but by combining sales from the showroom with revenue from a series of residential summer workshops held at the pottery, he and Lynn were able not only to make ends meet, but also to pay back most of the loans in a short time. The four or five weeklong sessions held at the pottery lasted for 16 years, and became the rock that underpinned the family finances.

One of those participants was responsible for Phil's first visit to the US. Suan Ying Tillman, from Vienna, Virginia, had seen the ad in Ceramic Monthly and thought a week in Wales was a nice idea. "It was beginner's luck," she says. "I hadn't heard of Phil at that time, but he turned out to be not only a good potter, but an excellent teacher. I decided that my fellow potters in the Washington, DC, area would appreciate an injection of his knowledge and enthusiasm for pottery. So I told Phil that if he'd be interested in coming to the States to do a workshop, I'd try to set one up with the local potters group, The Clay Connection. He was. And I did." That was 1993, and since then Rogers has crossed the pond numerous times to do workshops and deliver lectures.

Today, at age 51, [note: DOB is May 28, 1951] he continues on the same path that began a quarter century ago—passionately involved in what he does, and clearly in harmony with his surroundings. And like most potters, he is also a collector. In the house, everywhere you look you see pots—some 500 at last count. They're by the hearth, in the kitchen, hanging from living -room beams, in cupboards, on mantles, on stairway ledges, in the bathroom—pots by Bernard and David Leach, Hamada, Finch, Shimaoka, Pleydell-Bouverie, Michael Cardew, Svend Bayer, Warren Mackenzie, Hyme Rabinowitz, examples of 18th-century English and Welsh slipware and 16th-century German salt glaze, and many others.

His days are structured. He rises early, has breakfast, checks his emails, then takes a walk in the fields with Lynn and the dogs. By 9:30 he's in the workshop, breaks for a quick 15-minute lunch, then stays busy till around 6.

On the day of my visit, in an obvious departure from his normal routine, we spend the morning talking and sipping coffee in his spacious kitchen, then take a tour of the workshop, the kilns, and the showrooms, and enjoy a short walk with Libby and Tess. For lunch we drive into the village to his favorite pub, The Triangle, a cozy place, whose low ceilings force Rogers to stoop to avoid knocking his head on the beams. He is greeted warmly by the barmaid and several customers sitting around sipping pints of Welsh bitter.

Halfway through our meal Phil looks out the window and lets out an "ohmygod!" My head swivels. Charging down the narrow lane just outside the pub is a thundering herd of sheep, hundreds of them, farmer in tow, with a couple of border collies keeping everything under control. We hurry outside for a closer look. It's a charming scene, and for me another reminder of the rural roots of most potters throughout history. It seems fitting that Phil, a 21st-century potter following a centuries-old tradition, lives in a place where ages-old activities like this still occur.

Later, we get on the subject of the future. "I'm building a wood kiln,” he explains, “and hope that will open up new avenues. For me pottery is a development from one month or year to the next, and until one sees the results of the next batch of work then one isn't sure where the road might lead.”

I ask him if he ever thinks about his legacy—what he would like people 50 years from now to be saying about his work.

He ponders that for a moment, then says, "I always thought it would be nice to leave something behind, when one passes on to the great pottery in the sky, that records the fact that one was here at all! Vanity I suppose.

"Most people leave this earth having made a contribution in some form, but few leave behind tangible relics. I think it would be nice if, at the very least, people in 50 years time were to say that the pots were, in the main, unmistakably mine and that I did stretch the tradition a bit."