A View From The Edge

Twelve miles along the coast road and we reach a very different ceramic settlement, though Jason Wason recalls that ‘I spent a very valuable, informative five years at the Leach Pottery in the early stages of my career’. He has worked now at Higher Botallack, in a place of remoteness and removal, for some thirty-eight years, and we could as well be a thousand ceramic miles from St Ives. Though he too works primarily in the vessel form, the new body of work he has created for the Lemon Street Gallery in Truro (‘one year of my inner life’, he remarks) is severe and not soft in outline. The pots serve no domestic purpose. They are works of, and for, contemplation.

The view seen through his studio window melds time and the history of place. The ground dips and scurries down to the rough Atlantic edge. The land is marked with granite boulder outcroppings and rough gorse, grass and heather. The soil is sketchy and abraded. Ancient settlements are marked close by; and granite towers of the Cornish tin mines still stand erect against the seawater coursings. It is a place that seems to make an accord with time; to give a deeper weight to the past than the present. Philip Marsden talks about this as a place where the land becomes more marginal. Everything has to be hard-won; farming, mining or making art.

There is something of this time play at work in his new pots, too. This is no surprise for Wason has built into his work a creative tension between past and present. The bronzes as well as the ceramics seem to have eroded surfaces; there is a patina to them both. They seem to have had an archaeological past, though of course they are fresh from the kiln or the foundry. One pot Wason shows me is a few hours old. In this exhibition, in common with his whole body of work, we can find an acquiescence between past and present; ancient time and modernity.

This new work also bears his characteristically and even ferociously taut outlines. There is a disciplined cutting-edge to the profiles, and a lean elegance of form. Sometimes a tensile, swervy line will cross the surface of a dish; or a tight geometric pattern will cover a surface. A stunning colour burst occasionally appears on a cover or finial or circular spot: like a fiery Mars. There are few extrovert moments in the work, and the overall mood is quiet and votive. A pot such as Studded Vessel is highly balanced: rectangular sections around the body are scored either vertically or marked by a disciplined group of nine small studs. These studs are applied more prominently, even aggressively, to the edge of one of his temple top vessels which allude to Tibetan or Chinese architecture.

The ceremonial aspects of these works enforce the idea of inner-scape and containment which are