It has been a good week with the opening of the Contemporary Ceramics: A Personal Collection at the Craven Museum, Skipton. The personal collection is mine acquired over at least 30 years. It is the first time the pieces have been exhibited in public as a collection so I am really pleased that they are considered worthy of being shown to the public as a quality collection. There were lots of friends, family and colleagues at the preview evening on Wednesday. I appreciated the special effort Mark and Eve made and as Grace is staying with us at the moment the whole family was involved. The house is rather empty with nothing to look at when we get up in the morning! MSA tried as usual to mess things up by upsetting my bladder and bowel but didn’t quite succeed. There is a catalogue to accompany the show that you can order from the museum and/or me. Here are some quotes which say it all for me. I also recommend looking at my face book site because it has a photo album by Grace of the opening.
An interview with the collector
How did you start as a collector?
I didn’t collect things as a child but I did get the collecting bug when I was working in Freetown, Sierra Leone in the early 1970s. I had trained as an art teacher and wasn’t ready to settle down in an English school so I applied for a post sponsored by the Overseas Development Agency and had the choice of either going to Bermuda or Sierra Leone. I chose Sierra Leone because it was far more obscure and the chances of going there otherwise at that time were nil. Whilst there I bought four masks mostly because I loved them – they were so much part of the country I was in and they now hold special memories of my two years in Freetown.
I had been to art school and when I got back to the UK I worked with Yorkshire Arts for a while so the collection began partly because it was opportunistic – I knew I wasn’t going to have this chance again of seeing the pieces of work and working with the artists. My wife Liz, who was also a teacher in Freetown, and I chose ceramics rather than paintings partly because of the cost but also because we wanted to support the potters. I couldn’t believe the number of good potters that were around in Yorkshire and how good so many of them were, for example Jane Hamlyn and David Lloyd Jones. They were making terrific stuff [Jane still is], salt of the earth potters, and very modest with it. Peter Robinson was another guy producing very good work at the time. He was good at making things happen but eventually moved on to more teaching and community work.
The ceramics collection started with a piece by Catherine Beetham - a modest circular container with a lid to keep things in, from the Marble Street Workshop in Hebden Bridge, which had just been set up by Manchester Poly graduates. In buying this I was putting my toe in the water – it didn’t cost too much and it looked nice. I gave it to Liz to keep her bits and pieces in.
We began to put £10 a month away – quite a lot at the time – to buy work we liked. We didn’t have a plan. We had a pot of money and if we saw something we liked we could just buy it. It wasn’t always ceramics as there were some really good photographers, including Martin Parr, starting out at the time and beginning to make a name for themselves. Any extra money I made from freelance consultancy work we put aside and treat it like a bonus to go into our purchasing fund.
We didn’t think about collecting as an investment. Bonhams were having two auctions a year of contemporary ceramics so I used to get the catalogues and look at everything. All the prices in the auction room were much lower than the prices I had paid. The pieces had devalued in price but when I learnt that I felt quite liberated. The price didn’t matter and anyway they were only selling particular people – secure bets like Lucie Rie and Elizabeth Fritsch - so I was happy to buy things I saw that I liked.
I began to realise I was buying on a regular basis. The kids started to ask me when I was going to buy the next pot and increasingly I realised I was getting it about right so I drew up a hit list which I kept in my filofax – a list of potters names, and eventually acquired a piece from all of them. That’s when I bought the more expensive pieces – Britten, Baldwin, Ward - but I’ve never regarded collecting as an investment. I think that was the tipping point. I realised I had built up an important collection of its time.
All of the pots we own have little histories and look good in our converted chapel. The histories make them interesting in another dimension. Transporting some home was particularly challenging, for example the very large hand coiled Monica Young which our children have played in.
I have always been keen to support galleries - Godfrey and Watt in Harrogate was one of my favourite places – they were a classic intermediary. Alex Watt worked closely with a small number of artists and craftspeople building up a close relationship with them thereby ensuring that he always got their best work. Alex also knew his customer base and was very good at matching the two and often his exhibitions were sell outs. This to me is success – very difficult to do but if you get it right the cash gets to the artists quickly and regularly and builds up their reputations. In the scheme of things agents are often overlooked but if crafts are going to grow as a creative industries sector so must the intermediaries.
What is left to say apart from, go and see the pots for yourself,at the CRAVEN MUSEUM, SKIPTON. The exhibition is there until 7th May 2012.
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