🎧 Walter Keeler: Engaging the Mind Tim Saunders

Appears in the December 2024 issue of Ceramics Monthly.

At 81 years old, internationally renowned potter Walter Keeler is as “addicted” to making as he has ever been. “You have not chosen to do pottery,” says Keeler. “You’re driven into it. Curiosity is needed to make things.” He remains passionate about the possibilities of making, but is realistic that an older potter must accept aching bones and health issues and says that these have to be overcome “by adapting to what you can do.” “I still use a kick wheel and probably always will,” he reveals.

Unable to make anything since last October, due to caring for his wife, Keeler is nevertheless working toward a major London exhibition in the fall of 2024 but is getting a little nervous about meeting the deadline. His work is contemplative and, therefore, takes time to produce. “You always have your eye on the horizon,” he says, adding that a piece might be okay “but you could do this with it. . . There’s joy to be found but sometimes you wonder why you started a piece and end up down a blind alley!”

Engaging the Mind

He credits a conversation with potter Gordon Baldwin for improving his prospects. “He had been making functional things for the house—bowls, cups, etc., and he said just because it’s functional doesn’t mean you don’t engage your mind. That struck home. I thought, ‘That’s absolutely true.’ Then the penny dropped; I could engage my sculptural instinct in the making of functional things.” 

Prior to this, he had “the nasty but well-intentioned production wares, and the more satisfying, truer to my nature, pieces that had no function at all but were interesting. So, I made these really naff functional pots to make a living and the arty stuff to satisfy my soul! It reached a crisis point when I had so many orders for this blasted boring stuff and I only had two small electric kilns, which could run off a 13-amp plug, and so one day I said to my wife, Madoline, ‘I’m going to put the lot in the salt kiln.’ They had normal oxidation glazes, I fired them up and they were fabulous. Change was happening gradually.”

Culture and Possibilities

At school, Keeler, who is dyslexic, failed his 11+ examination. The art teacher at his secondary modern was the only one to treat him “like a person” and when he said goodbye at the end, this teacher asked what he was going to do. “Get a job,” was Keeler’s response. “Why not go to art school?” proposed the teacher. Keeler followed this advice and enrolled at Harrow School of Art. “Art school was a transformation. It was a window on culture and possibilities.” The newly invigorated Keeler soon found that “pottery is who I am.” “I’m denying myself if I don’t make pots, which is crazy, isn’t it? The whole point of making pots is to produce something that lives in some way. The vitality of the making process.” 

His eminent tutors at Harrow School of Art were Michael Casson and Victor Margrie. Here Keeler met his future wife, Madoline, too. When the pair left, Madoline was accepted into the Royal College of Art while Keeler was not. Madoline’s view of the pottery world broadened Keeler’s. “I would always rush into the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) to look at the medieval jugs, German salt glaze, and have a look at the odd amateur teapot or a Kenzan teabowl. I would walk straight past all the eighteenth-century industrial pottery because that wasn’t for people like us. Madoline was encouraged to look at that and to draw it, see the beauty, the dynamics of them, the quirkiness and crankiness. So, she dragged me into the industrial section and made me look at these things. I admitted that they had certain qualities that I had been too prejudiced to look at and to see. That stayed with me always. There’s more to pottery than the knuckle marks and wobbly bits.” 

A Career with Opportunities

When he left Harrow and had his first serious workshop, Keeler was practicing production throwing. “I was trying out techniques, learning how to make glazes of my own. I was throwing quite aggressively, using the rib against the clay, making torn edges, and detailed bits that were a result of the tool impacting the material. I would show those pieces in places like the Design Centre. So people became aware that I made these things.” 

His teaching career started when Victor Margrie (Harrow School of Art, first director of the Crafts Council) “tentatively offered me some teaching opportunities.” Keeler explains, “I didn’t think I was any good at it, but I used to go in and do it and got paid so that we were then in a position to buy our first house in Buckinghamshire with a big chicken shed, which became a pottery.”

He started approaching galleries to stock his work. “I remember driving to one on Little Clarendon Street, Oxford, and said, ‘Do you want to buy some pots?’ And they’d say, ‘We’ll have some of those,’ and give me a check.” 

In his childhood, Keeler visited museums with his father, a keen historian. “We went to The British Museum sometimes and the Museum of London and I would look at artifacts. I gravitated towards pots. Pots were always there. Many civilizations had pots.”

Inspired, Keeler joined the local history society. “They had a boring dig in Wembley, which I’d go to with a friend on a Saturday and I was introduced to an archaeologist. He said, ‘Why don’t you go mudlarking? When the tide goes out on the Thames, walk along the foreshore and pick up lots of interesting things.’” This gave Keeler an “insight into what the insides of a pot should look like.” 

Walter Keeler’s work is in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum; National Museum Wales; American Craft Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, US; and the Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

the author British journalist Tim Saunders writes about art and ceramics. When he has time, he enjoys painting and making.