Lisa Hammond: Intuited Grace Lisa Hammond

It is not surprising that Lisa Hammond has been described as the best woman potter working in Britain at the moment. I would go further. I would say that she is a prominent member of a very elite group of perhaps ten potters who, irrespective of style, gender or genre, are at the very top of a very competitive ladder. Hammond’s recent work exudes the strength, style and finesse of a potter at the very peak of her form. Classic yet somehow contemporary, crisply defined yet with a softness of form and surface, Hammond’s pots carry with them a complete “rightness” of orchestration that is the result of a thirty-year career as a professional maker of pots for a domestic setting.

Hammond is indeed a rarity in British studio ceramics: a potter making strong, adventurous, vapor-glazed stoneware in an inner-city, urban setting. Maze Hill Pottery, her second workshop in Greenwich, is situated in a small Victorian brick building that used to be the ticket office at Maze Hill Station, Southeast London. Hammond has been at this location since 1994, prodigiously producing an extensive range of soda glazed kitchen and tableware with an ever-increasing number of individual pieces. Alongside her production work she has organized and taught a series of twice-weekly throwing classes which she views as an important way to introduce pottery to a wider audience and, in a small way, to supplement the ever-decreasing availability of classes in the public sector. Her seemingly indefatigable energy has also seen the coming and going of a series of apprentices who, in many cases, now have their own successful careers.

The pottery itself isn't large. Where people once purchased their tickets for the short journey into central London there are now rows of shelves lined with tall, medieval-inspired jugs, chawan (tea bowls), squared and faceted bottles and lidded jars. The throwing area is small, but a well-structured system of regular monthly firings ensures that there is no bottleneck and the space is utilized to its maximum efficiency. A small corner of the building serves as a gallery and sales area. The kilns, one 90 cubic feet and another, a more modest 40 cubic feet, are situated outside next to the railway line and must have caused more than one quizzical glance from a passing passenger in the darkness of night. Presently, in the United Kingdom at least, there seems to be a plethora of metropolitan potters making inane, frankly, very boring, and extremely "safe" porcelain tableware in that ubiquitous minimalist or interiors style. Hammond, on the other hand, is a potter that has never been afraid to take her work to new and often taxing levels. Throughout her career she has consistently tested her materials to the limit and continues to research new clay bodies and slips that will both compliment the Shino glazes and respond well with the capricious atmosphere of the vapor kiln. Hammond has never been content with the relative comfort of past successes. Her inquisitive nature and fascination for all things ceramic demands continuous experimentation. She is no less vigorous in her quest for the perfect firing and is constantly tweaking the schedule in response to unexpected, often minute but possibly welcome, variance in a previous firing. Recently Hammond's work has taken another interesting and imaginative path with her newfound passion for the Japanese Shino glaze, which she fires in two different ways: in a dedicated eighty-hour, gas-fueled kiln; and in conjunction with the vaporous atmosphere of the soda kiln. These new experiments have yielded glazes with great physical depth and intensity of color and can quite genuinely be said to be innovative and groundbreaking.

The Boston potter Warren Mather is credited by many in the U.S. for the introduction of vapor glazing by virtue of sodium carbonate rather than sodium chloride. Initially thought to be environmentally less damaging than the chloride, there was much enthusiasm for the carbonate as a friendlier alternative. Research carried out in the U.S. by Wil Shynkaruk and Gil Stengel (see "The Truth About Salt," by Gil Stengel, September 1998 CM) and in the U.K. by Peter Meanley, has shown fairly conclusively that this may not, in fact, be the case. However, whatever the rights or wrongs of the environmental issues, it is fair to say that Hammond, as far back as 1982, was a pioneer of the technique in the United Kingdom.Early experiments were not immediately successful. Eventually though, it was realized that the sodium carbonate, on exposure to the white heat of 2300°F (1260°C), is chemically broken down in a very different way than sodium chloride. Instead of that all-consuming explosion of vapor that occurs with the chloride, the carbonate is a slower process and the vapors less overwhelming. In contrast to the plumes of white exhaust at the chimney of the salt kiln, there is little to see from the chimney of a soda firing. Hammond set about exploiting the tendency of sodium carbonate to exit the kiln by a well-defined path and encouraged the characteristic flashing associated with sodium carbonate. Later, she taught the technique at Goldsmiths College in London where, amongst others, Ruthanne Tudball was a receptive student.

Japan has always been a place that Hammond has turned to both for inspiration and, in recent years, as a market for her pots. Indeed, early in 2007 she will be only the second non-Japanese potter to have an exhibition of her work at the Mashiko Museum of Ceramic Art and then at the prestigious Keio department store in Tokyo. The experience of a prolonged working period alongside renowned Shino potter Rizu Takahashi at his pottery in Mino was to become a watershed in her career. Having been, for many years, the leading exponent of the art of soda firing, Hammond had found, in Shino glazes, a new and exciting means of expression that she instinctively felt would sit comfortably alongside the soda glazed aspect of her work. In Hammond's hands, the rich oranges and pinks from the soda kiln rely heavily on a surfeit of alumina. Shino too, produces similar coloring from alumina rich feldspars, and the plan was born to combine both in one kiln.The Shino glaze, in the hands of the traditional Japanese potter, is quite unlike the overly refined, somewhat synthetic Western versions. Difficult, unreliable, inconsistent and demanding, Shino in its truest form is an enigma. In essence, the ingredients are very simple; the recipe sometimes contains just one material: feldspar. The difficult part-the mystery that makes the perfect Shino almost the potters Holy Grail-is the complex, often protracted firing with its irregular temperature gradient and reduction cooling. With an understanding rare in the West, Hammond inspects every nuance, every unexpected variance of color or texture in great detail, either in an attempt to repeat an effect or to eliminate it in the next firing. Uncompromising in her quest for the qualities she seeks, Hammond is always open and receptive to alternative directions that the kilns or the materials might suggest to her. The combination of the capricious vaporous atmosphere, the unctuous Shino glazes and the constant search for variation and refinement within her repertoire of faceted and altered, thrown shapes has created a new, wholly more sophisticated and seasoned body of work.

I have often related to students the notion that a good pot, irrespective of the outward appearance, should contain an inner skeleton. The fashion amongst wood firers, for instance, to make "loose" or "freely thrown" work is an attempt to ape some of the better-known Japanese wood-fired wares such as Iga or Shigaraki (particularly Iga).Often, these pots fail because there is little understanding of the nature of the original, together with scant regard to the ‘bones' of the pot, the skeleton I spoke of. One is left with flabby, formless and unstructured forms where it is hoped that the flashed effects of the fire will perform a miraculous rescue. Hammond's pots display the structured form implicitly and with obvious clarity even though the outward appearance can be softened by the thick, sometimes crawled Shino glaze or the extreme variation of the directional soda vapor. The outer skin is draped over an inner framework and the pots sit erect and dignified, confident in their poise and balance. There is never a brushed decorative motif, no decorative afterthought. All decoration is in the clay or in the glaze itself-confident faceting, the spontaneous sweep of the fingers through wet glaze, the unwavering and direct marks of a coarse brush or the ghostly impression of a scallop shell adding its own dynamic to the side of a swollen bottle. All of these are decorative treatments that are dictated by the structure of the pot and together they create an integral whole; an expression of the entire unity of clay, glaze and form.

It is my contention that the element that marks out the work of an excellent potter from that of the ordinary is an almost indefinable "correctness" of orchestration. There is for some an intuitive ability to see almost immediately that the proportions of a pot are correct. The neck is suited to the body; the height of the pot is appropriate to its breadth; the angle of growth appropriate to the width of the base and height of the wall to the shoulder and so on. Cardew had this talent, more so than Leach. Hamada certainly had it. Hammond has it too. There exists within the best of her pieces a comfortable, almost nonchalant truth that may have come from years of designing table and kitchenware with a unifying style, but more likely, I believe, is born within her and unteachable.Hammond's recent show at the impressive Goldmark Gallery in Uppingham, U.K., was an amazing success. Of 160 pieces shown almost all were sold, and collectors were unanimous in their opinion that it was an exhibition of importance and one to remember and to savor. Hammond showed her full range of shapes, colors and textures: Thick, unctuous Shinos, pitted and crawled in the most marvelous ways, glowing with pink and orange warmth. Ash celadons provide a cooler green or blue counterpoise to the heat of the Shino. Finger sweeps through slip and glaze create an energy over the surface of the chawan (teabowl) and yunomi (teacup) complimenting the relaxed throwing. The sensitive and imaginative use of a second, poured layer of glaze conjures images of landscape or waterfall. The exhibition was a tour de force and is fortunately recorded in a lavishly illustrated catalog that is available from the Goldmark Gallery (www.modernpots.com).

For me, at least, studio pottery should say something about the intimate and often elemental relationship of glaze to clay. A pot should communicate the makers joy and endeavor in its making and converse with its purchaser on a daily basis, revealing new and formerly unseen secrets. A pot should display a sense of adventure. For Lisa Hammond, pottery is an all-consuming vocation. Yes, it represents her livelihood, but to Hammond, pottery represents far more than a means to exist. Pottery is her life, her passion. I know no other potter who is more concerned with the search for constant improvement and refinement. The new work, with its austere Japanese influence integrated with a European potter's instinctive marriage of function and aesthetic consideration, is elevated from merely good, honest, robust domestic pottery to pots with significant and lasting virtue.