PROFILE

The work of Ashley Howard remains extraordinarily fresh. He is an assured but rigorous explorer and celebrant of the past, clearly indebted to a variety of ceramic traditions, but he has been able to absorb these ideas into a very modern, resourceful and uncommonly free language of his own.

His approach has always been one of physical expansion and openness, not precocity and constriction. He is the broadest, most gestural kind of thrower, leaving instilled in the finished form the richly, but too rarely explored, expressive power of the wheel. In this respect he is an inheritor of a particular dynamic in thrown work so famously achieved by one of his teachers Colin Pearson, a potter who brought a quite new and vigorous aesthetic to the discipline in the 1960s. It is seen too in other Pearson pupils — for example Dan Kelly and Colin Gorry — who, like Howard, bring out the clay’s special plasticity a preserved sense of wetness. There is also an antecedent in the sweepingly gestural pots of the late Janet Leach, who appeared to take her lead not only from ancient Japanese kilns, but from the ambition of so much post-war American and European abstraction.

Like Pearson and Leach, Howard builds and alters - making additions to the form after it has left the wheel - big bowls often starting in a dish mould, making up a lid, adding rims at the leather hard stage. In this way, Howard enjoys the process of construction too: indeed he is really as much a builder as a wheel potter, enjoying the limitless combinations of technical approach. This experimental, rather maverick attitude to making reminds me of the Japanese potter Rosanjin, who simply loved to play with the clay, with decoration and colour. Rosanjin wrote: "An artist must have unlimited freedom. To be bound by the customs and diehard ways of the past is to bound all potential for creativity.”

Howard is certainly no slave to history, even though he recognises something of it in his work; for example his more recent pots, increasingly simple and unmannered, have some of the qualities of Onbe and Shino wares, in part because of their thick glazing, another Howard hallmark. Particularly known for his luminous copper blues, he has recently developed some quieter creamy whites which help to accentuate character of form and add distinction in a more understated way. Howard remains, however, a potter of theatre. As much as his ceramics explore asymmetry, and revel in dents and warps of surface, so his pigments bleed and stain in the kiln, resulting in a patina of depth and variety.

It is the fluid sensuality of his pots that makes them so memorable. They emanate energy and an enthusiasm for making. “Good pots tell stories”, my father used to say, and Ashley Howard’s wear their history, their creative process, all over them. Rosanjin wrote of his Korean and Japanese sources: ”... I do not try to imitate them in a superficial way. I try to go straight to their inner values, their essence and their spirit” Ashley Howard is himself using tradition and his own idiosyncratic hand to enliven the language of the present, and in so doing, helps to give clay its continuing life.

DAVID WHITING

Ashley Howard is steadily consolidating a reputation as a potter of integrity and a contagious theatrical physicality. A dedicated educationalist, he is currently head of Ceramics at the University College of Creative Arts, Farnham, and has exhibited widely and contributed energetically to the contemporary ceramics landscape. His appreciation of craftsmanship yet continual willingness to explore the potential of material, process and control, often in very fluid material handling, is an asset to the current pantheon of ceramics practice in the UK.

GARETH MASON