Santa

Our Santa, a joint effort made by me and Ann

The Potters Of Mumbai

Dharavi, is spread over 540 acres of land and around 70,000 households, it is the biggest slum in Asia. The history of Dharavi dates back to the pre-independence period. As per the records, the earliest colony of fishermen in the area known as Dharavi today was set up way back in 1910.

Dharavi is located in Sion, also called as sheev. The literal translation of this Marathi word is ‘border’. Historically, the Dharavi slum was set up outside the city because as per the prevalent social norms of that time, people involved in occupations such as leather, pottery and fishing were considered of lower caste and their place was outside the village. However, ,Nathabhai Chauhan is a well-known potter from Kumbharwada. His pots, diyas and other decorative items are extremely popular amongst the upper-middle class and middle-class market. He also provides these items for Hindi serials and films. “Kumbharwada (potter’s land) is one of the oldest colonies in Mumbai, functioning since 1912. The potters in Dharavi are from Saurashtra, Gujarat,” he explained.

In 1912, Mumbai was developing, and a port and sea-route was the only convenient itinerary to reach Mumbai from Gujarat. Around 150-200 potter families used to come from Saurashtra via the sea route to Mumbai for eight months a year. The soil around the Dharavi area was perfect for their business. These families used to live in small huts made of coconut tree leaves. In 1932, all these huts were burned in an inferno, after which the trader community in Mumbai helped these potter families with money, food and shelter.

Potters of the time around 1910 requested for land from the then British government, with the help of the Mumbai’s trader community. The British government approved the request and allotted 13.5 acres of land in Dharavi on a lease of 99 years. After this, these 200 families were settled permanently in Dharavi and started their small-scale business of producing earthen pots, diyas, murals etc. Now, around 385 families work in Kumbharwada. Kumbharwada produces around 70% of the earthen pots and diyas sold in Mumbai. The 13 acres of land provide employment to 2,000 workers.

The age-old brick furnaces used to bake the pots require raw material such as cotton. “As the cotton-mills in Mumbai started closing down, the supply of cotton waste to Kumbharwada became scanty. Without proper raw material, the furnaces stopped functioning and without the furnace the soil items could not be baked; ultimately, the potter’s life became hellish,” said Raju Korde, of Dharavi Bachao Samiti. The potters have to import the waste-cotton from Gujarat, which increases the total cost of a product. Since the pollution caused by the old furnaces is also becoming an important issue, the potters are trying to set-up gas furnaces.

Joan Miro's Ceramics

When people think of the works of Spanish artist Joan Miro, most people do not think of ceramics. He was one of the 20th century’s great modernist artists. However, he was more famous for his large sculptures and paintings on canvas. Many think of craft i.e ceramics as not a part of art.

Why do we have to put things into boxes and think in such oppositional terms. In many cases it not artist who make these decisions by curators, historians and art dealers in the 20th century as paintings dominated and were thought to be the apex of the modernist aesthetic pyramid, with ceramics being very near the bottom.

Miro and some other leading artists decided to change this, and use there skills in ceramics. whist the works Miro made had his name to them, Each work is, in fact, part of a collaborative venture, most with Spanish ceramist Josep Llorens Artigas, a contemporary of Miró's with whom he initially began to work during World War II but whom he had known since art school days.

His son took over when Joan Gardy Artigas when the elder became too ill to continue their partnership, and there even are a handful of beautifully grotesque earthenware heads done with ceramist Hans Spinner (better known, perhaps, for his collaboration with British sculptor Anthony Caro) in 1981, only two years before Miró's death at age 90.

The collaborations between Artigas the elder and Miró had a shaky start. Artigas, who had by that time eliminated all decorative elements from his work. He was concurred that Miro would use  his painterly style to just decorate the ceramic pieces as he did in his paintings. 

Miro also new he had to adapt, to learn how to paint on ceramics. Works done in 1944 comprised a series of tiles Artigas provided Miró to paint upon. The results were less than satisfactory, and most were destroyed. Miró and Artigas worked together producing plates, vases, sculptures and plaques until 1971 when the latter bowed out and his son, Joan, took up the collaborative slack.

Take a look at The Buckley Pottery Etsy and Folksy shops

https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/thebuckleypottery

https://folksy.com/shops/TheBuckleyPottery

THE BUCKLEY POTTERIES

The Buckley Potteries    

Buckley today is a town of around 16,000 people, and there has been a settlement on or near the present site since the Bronze Age. The town was first documented in 1294 as ‘the pasturage of the Manor of Ewloe’, and it was around this time that coal-mining and pottery making were recorded in this area. 

Buckley is surrounded by and contains many coal deposits which are so near the surface that they are easily accessible without deep shaft mining, and could be collected from shallow pits by lifting the coal up in baskets. Hard fire clay was found alongside the coal deposits, which could be collected after weathering in the elements. Sticky pot clay was found on the surface and in nearby fields.

This combination of available clays was perfect for making earthenware cheaply. Lead was another important ingredient for glazing the pots, and had been mined since Roman times in nearby Halkyn and Rhosesmor. 

Buckley was well positioned to export goods, as several streams started in and around the town, which flowed down to the River Dee Estuary. These streams formed channels in the sand, which at high tide boats could sail up, collect their cargoes of earthenware and coal, and return to sea. 

Pottery was also exported by land to Chester market along the ‘Dirty Mile’ - the local name for the road from Chester to Buckley – and after 1866, by railway to the rest of Great Britain.

The Buckley industries attracted migrant workers from the 12th Century onwards, one of the first being a colony of English miners and potters who lived amongst the native Welsh on Buckley Mountain. Thrown together as neighbours and co-workers in an isolated environment, the people of Buckley developed their own predominantly English dialect, borrowing many Welsh words and pronunciations. 

Mines, brickworks and family-run potteries were well established at the time of Elizabeth I, and Buckley began to attract more people to settle in the area. In 1737, Jonathan Catterall started the Buckley Firebrick Industry, which pulled people in from as far as Devon, Cornwall and Ireland, as well as the nearby counties of Cheshire, Staffordshire, Lancashire and Yorkshire. 

© Buckley Heritage Society

The Buckley dialect began to develop through the generations of immigrants and natives, borrowing words and phrase from each other, and boiling them down to produce a vocabulary that was unique to the area. 

In the 19th Century, many outsiders from the border counties and Staffordshire will still moving to the district, but the main industries of Buckley were beginning to encounter difficulties. In coal mining, many of the surface coal seams were exhausted, and it became necessary to extract coal from greater depths. 

Mass production of crockery and enamel dishes, and the development of the railway system which made these products more available, began to pose a threat to Buckley’s family-run earthenware businesses. The outbreak of two World Wars in the 20th Century drew workers away from Buckley to the front lines, and reduced the number of family-run potteries to a handful.

This dish was excavated at Brookhill Pottery, Buckley, where it was made c. 1640-1670. When it is leather hard a design is scratched through the slip to reveal the contrasting body of the pot beneath.

© The Buckley Heritage Centre

Some potteries like Hayes’s Pottery, which was established in 1740, continued to produce Buckley pottery and remain in the same family ownership until its closure in the 1940’s. Others, like Powell’s Pottery, which was the largest Buckley Pottery until 1914, converted their production line to work in engineering and plastics. 

Sharret’s Pottery, which became The Art Pottery Co. and then J. Lamb & Sons was closed in the early 1940’s leaving a kiln of unbaked pottery. The owner’s son returned from the war in 1946 and fired up the kiln, baking the pottery that was left. After it was fired, it was found to be of an excellent quality, and was the last bulk produced earthenware in Buckley. 

Buckley’s surrounding countryside provided the town with a valuable combination of natural resources that sustained its earthenware, mining and brick-making industries for over 500 years. Although these industries fell into decline through mass production elsewhere, a legacy remains in the regional dialect that is still remembered and spoken today. 

The Fragmented Figures of Stephen de Staebler

The fractured human figure, has been the subject of Stephen de Staebler’s work for many years. He reduced the image of the body to just a human leg. His new works have become larger, nearly 6 feet in height, and stand witness to endurance. It’s fuses tangible parts of clay in a way that looks precarious and unbalanced.

The fractured human figure of his work may be related to his old teacher Peter Voulkos, who broke ceramic vessels and made them into clay sculptures.

Neil Brownsword works similar making forms out of shards found in his homeland the potteries.

De Staebler first started making horizontal forms in the image of landscape, Undulating hills often seen as anthropomorphic ridges and mountains. These works allude to the curvature of the human body. This concept could be of the intimates relationship between humans and the earth.

As he continued to make large sculpture he learned more about the clay being unpredictable weather wet and soft, or leather hard, cracked, brittle and dry.

After working with bronze he has returned back to fired clay, in a constant war against technology, which he feels is dehumanising and contaminating the world.

He is figures are not gender based, but have a universal appeal in their archaic and androgynous figuration. At times the artist feels the need to just give the form parts and segments instead of all of its entirety.

Some of his largest clay figures were done in sections and held up by a matrix of bricks these were put in place before their upright orientation. He uses a natural clay colours but also using copper oxide to obtain black patches and also pink turquoise blue and orange tonalities which provide a sense of vitality in their contrast hue of the clay.

He is an avid collector, and hangs on to things he has made from the past. He also keeps many things destined for the dump, with his hillside garden being a graveyard for sculptures remnants. These days he reclaims much of his work and assembling them into new works.

He has this craft of being contemporary and also ancient at the same time. His work has come round full circle.

Over the years De Staebler has fired hundreds of pieces in tests and experiments on clay to test for strength and colour. He saved many of these pieces and now incorporate them into his work. He says there is almost “magnetic attraction between them”, only he knows how the pieces will somehow fit together.

A Snippet Of History: Anthony Gaudi

A Snippet Of History: Anthony Gaudi

Despite popular belief the footballer Lionel Messi is possibly not Barcelona’s number one son. With Picasso and Miro, Antoni Gaudi ranks as one of the worlds greats artists. If you have ever been to Barcelona His architecture abounds in many places with the panicle Sagrada Familia.

After Gaudi graduated, he initially worked in the vein of his Victorian predecessors but soon developed a style that juxtapositions geometric mass with animated the surfaces of patterned brick and stone, whilst also incorporating wood metal and mosaic. During his early period at the Paris World’s Fair of 1878, Gaudi showcased the work he had produced.

This impressed one patron enough, which led to further work including, Güell Estate and Güell Palace. In 1883, Gaudi was charged with the construction of a Barcelona cathedral called Basilica i Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Familia (Basilica and Expiatory Church of the Holy Family). The plans had been drawn up earlier, and construction had already begun, but Gaudi completely changed the design, stamping it with his own distinctive style.

However, Gaudi soon started experimenting with various permutations of historic styles from gothic to baroque, as can be seen in Episcopal Palace (1887–’93) and the Casa de los Botines (1892–’94), which is gothic and the Casa Calvet (1898–1904), which was built in the Baroque style. After 1902 as a mature artist Gaudi’s designs began to defy convention and stylistic classification.

This created a style known as equilibrated, when defined means that it can stand on its own, without internal bracing and external buttressing. The primary way this was achieved was by using a system of columns tilted to employ diagonal thrusts and a series of tile volts. He used this system to construct two Barcelona apartment buildings Casa Batlló (1904–06) and the Casa Milà (1905–10), whose floors were structured like clusters of tile lily pads. Both projects are considered to be characteristic of Gaudi’s style.

After 1910, Gaudi abandoned nearly all other work to focus on the Sagrada Familia he closeted himself on site, living in his workshop. Gaudi employed his equilibrated methods on this church but also used gothic and art nouveau styles that are present but beyond recognition.Gaudi died while still working on Sagrada Familia on June the 10th 1926, after being hit by a trolley car in his beloved Barcelona. This was just a few weeks before his 75th birthday Sagrada Familia was unfinished when he died. However, construction has been ongoing, with an estimated completion date on the anniversary of his death in 2026 that would mark the 100th anniversary of his passing.  
Take a look at The Buckley Pottery shops : 

https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/thebuckleypottery?ref=hdr_shop_menu

https://folksy.com/shops/TheBuckleyPottery

Also plenty of interesting photos on pinterest :https://uk.pinterest.com/thebuckleypotte/ 

Beautiful Wales

Beautiful Wales.

After moving to Cardiff south Wales, to study my BA (Hons). I fell in love with the country the culture the people.

I was amazed at the passion and loyalty the welsh have for their country and i was swept away with this infectious welshness. I then moved to Preston to do my masters. However, after I completed this, I moved back to north wales to Buckley, and to start a pottery “The Buckley Pottery”. 

What a lovely and beautiful area I have moved to. Although Buckley was very industrial in the past, with many brick works, coal mines and potteries, there is very little industry here now, but the passion and humour is still here.

A few miles down the road the scenery is amazing to the west there are the Clwydian range of mountains, and further on snowdonia. I feel so lucky to be here, and i really feel at home. The place where i am meant to be? thethinkingtank.tumblr.com

I’ve even started Welsh lessons.

Why not Take a look at The Buckley Pottery Shops on 

Folksy:   https://folksy.com/shops/TheBuckleyPottery

Etsy:  https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/thebuckleypottery?ref=hdr_shop_menu