arts and design

Alan Wallwork obituary

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Alan Wallwork, who has died aged 88, was one of Britain’s most distinctive potters, known for sculptural work that was important in the story of studio ceramics, but who should also be judged in the context of the broader artistic developments in the country in the 1950s and 60s.

For Alan, clay was the ideal expressive medium for organic and preternatural objects that explored forms in nature and the landscape, such as gourds, seeds and fossils, as well as archaic and totemic shapes from early human history.

He developed an archetypal language that echoed some of the wider artistic obsessions of that period, what the art critic Herbert Read called the “postwar ferment” of sculptural activity. Sculptors such as William Turnbull, Eduardo Paolozzi and Hubert Dalwood explored related territories of biomorphism, and painters including Alan Reynolds and Edward Middleditch were drawn to organic subjects, to the scrubby peripheries of fields and roads burgeoning with cow parsley, or scattered with poppy seed pods and teasels. This was Wallwork country, too.

Alan was part of a postwar shift in clay that went beyond functional domestic pieces. This experimentation centred largely on London art colleges such as the Central School and Goldsmiths College, where Alan went in 1955, studying under Kenneth Clark and Gordon Baldwin, both avant-garde potters who opened up new aesthetic and technical possibilities.

Alan Wallwork pictured in 2011.



Alan Wallwork pictured in 2011. Photograph: Brian Usher

The medium was being used in fresh, innovative sculpture and architectural schemes. As Alan later wrote, “We were all well aware of the large-scale ceramics being turned out by the potter William Newland and others for the Golden Egg restaurants and the coffee bars in London. The time seemed so full of optimism and encouragement.” It was a heady period, when artistically anything seemed achievable.

Alan was born in Watford, Hertfordshire, the son of James Wallwork, a graphic artist, and his wife, Muriel (nee Lake). He was initially interested in film design, but after national service he opted to study art, and in 1954 he went to Newland Park teacher training college at Chalfont St Peter in Buckinghamshire. There he discovered well-equipped pottery studios but no teacher, so he began a course of self-tuition in clay, using Bernard Leach’s A Potter’s Book.

On leaving Goldsmiths in 1956 he spent time teaching, and set up a communal studio of artists in Forest Hill, south London. As well as workshop space, he opened a gallery where potters from outside such as Lucie Rie and Clark were shown along with paintings by artists at the studio – but the pots sold better. Initially Alan made earthenware tin-glazed domestic pots, later adopting stoneware. He was joined by a fellow student from Goldsmiths, Bernard Rooke, and both moved to larger premises in Greenwich in 1960.

Alan’s functional designs and exuberant tiles were being shown at the Design Centre, Heal’s department store and the Craft Potters Association in Soho. Meanwhile, like Rooke, who was adopting a similar stylistic direction, Alan was now producing adventurous individual pieces. These were coil-built, made on a wheel, hand-pinched or constructed from clay slabs. Shapes ranged from smooth pebble forms to taller, more articulated totems, with pitted, pierced and abraded surfaces enriched with glazes and oxides. Bigger objects were made with the help of assistants.

Needing to expand tile production, Alan found an old chapel at Marnhull, near Sturminster Newton in Dorset, and moved there in 1965. However, in the next decade he became worried about the environment and his heavy use of resources for fuel, and so eventually decided to downsize. In 1984 he moved to a high woodland setting above Lyme Regis that was “spectacular but somewhat impractical”.

Here and subsequently on a better site at nearby Uplyme he concentrated on his softer, more rounded, hand-built pieces, producing tactile pebbles and seed-pods, pinch pots and “crescent” shapes, further stimulated by Dorset’s fertile coastal landscape. Such work conveyed a sense of ritual and mystery and he exhibited widely, while continuing to write discerning articles on ceramics.

In 2004 he moved to France, to Missègre, in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Here, in addition to his work, he enjoyed the sun, copious wine consumption and sending entertainingly discursive letters and emails to family and friends. However, increasingly troubled by ill health, he spent the larger part of his last years back in Dorset, finally at Bere Regis. Gratifyingly his work, which had always sold well, was enjoying a considerable renaissance.

A vivid and highly engaging character, Alan epitomised the often quietly subversive spirit of British studio pottery. He was a prolific and hardworking artist, an enabler who contributed much to ceramics’ sense of community and professionalism, but he also lived life to his own rules, away from the mainstream.

He is survived by his children Amanda, Dillon and Tristan, from his marriage to Elizabeth Hayes, and Jessica and Rebecca, from his marriage to Mary Jones. Both marriages ended in divorce.

Alan Wallwork, potter, born 7 June 1931; died 2 November 2019

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