Robert Goldsmith - Selborne Pottery
by Angie Boyer
Listen to Robert Goldsmith talking enthusiastically about his work and you would think he was simply born to be a potter, but he almost took a different path in life, to study and work in science.
“I did my Art Foundation in Liverpool, my home town”, he told me. “I actually had a place offered at Sheffield to read biology, but then I saw the Ceramics course at Farnham and knew that was where I wanted to be.” With parents whose occupations straddle the arts and sciences - his father a doctor, his mother an artist - I imagine it could have gone either way for Robert, but how lucky the British craft world is that he chose pottery. “My mother is a painter, she trained at St. Martins and art is her whole life; she lives, thinks and dreams it! She sculpts as well, so I grew up with clay always in the house. I made my first teapot when I was very, very young. I also had a really good pottery teacher at school who taught me the basics, I was smitten by clay as a child!”. Robert tells me about his tutors at the West Surrey College of Art & Design in Farnham, names that history is made of, Sebastian Blackie, John Maltby, Paul Barron, Henry Hammond....
“They were brilliant tutors, all of them big enough people to allow their students to choose their own discipline, without steering them all in the same direction.” Robert attained a BA Hons in Ceramics there and has spent the following twenty two years working as a potter.
“The years in training at Farnham were very happy times and I still keep in touch with people from those days, although as far as I’m aware, I am the only one who is actually making now. I don’t think anyone else from those days has set up a pottery.”
Like most graduates, Robert’s main concern when he left art school was whether or not he would be able to earn a living from his work. “Lots of people just assume that they’ll have to teach to make ends meet, but that wasn’t what I wanted to do,” he recalled. “My first workshop was at Neatham Mill, near Holybourne in Hampshire. I was hardy and young and lived off very little money, but I was doing what I wanted to do - working with clay.” When, a short time later in 1985, he was offered a workshop in Selborne, Robert “snapped it up”, the place that has since become Selborne Pottery and home to his work.
Selborne is a pretty Hampshire village with the Pottery situated in an attractive cobbled courtyard, close to Gilbert White’s House, (18th century naturalist and author of the famous ‘Natural History of Selborne’). “I was quite lucky really to find this place, affordable workspace is almost impossible to find here now, it’s become really difficult to start a business in the south of the country. It’s a beautiful area and very lovely here, although nothing much happens until the Spring each year, when seasonal visitors come to the region.”
Over the years Selborne Pottery has established a reputation for producing fine hand thrown and turned stoneware, using traditional techniques. “We don’t try to mimic the past,” explained Robert, “but draw on skills rarely practised today.” Visitors to the pottery are fascinated to watch the pots being made. “Many people are just so pleased to find that a traditional pottery - and real, live potters! - still exist, where pots continue to be thrown and decorated by hand, where skills are still in use” said Robert. He and his assistants work together using high temperature stoneware glazes, fine brushwork wax resist and glaze trailing, to create pots with rich copper red and cobalt blue glazes, which are both functional and decorative whilst retaining a contemporary look. “On our Specials range, gold lustre is hand decorated on to the stoneware pot and then fired again adding a luxurious opulence not normally found on studio pottery,” explained Robert. “The glazes and pigments are made up from raw materials in the pottery and are fired in a gas kiln to over 1300 Celsius. This fuses both clay and glaze together in an impenetrable bond, giving the pottery both its brightness and its depth of colour. Although decorative, the pots have been designed to be used and are oven and dishwasher safe. “I currently employ two people and have several part-timers helping out, there is a student from Slovenia working with me at the moment who is a fantastically good thrower. I have trained lots of people over the years, Peter Bodosky from Hungary, Tanya Hoppe from Germany, Camilla Antognoli, the UK potter. Jenny Burrells is my current decorating assistant and has been with me for over ten years. But it doesn’t always work out for people to become potters, my first assistant from Hungary now lives in the USA and works as an airline pilot! It’s good to share what I know though, these days, if you want to train as a domestic ware potter, there is not much opportunity to learn, there are not many potters left who take on assistants.
“Like most craftsmen, I work long hours, if I’m honest I would say that sometimes I love it, but sometimes I don’t. Some days all is well with the world, it’s lovely sitting in the courtyard here, other days it doesn’t fall into place so well.” Robert now sells mainly wholesale to galleries and shops, with about 20% of his work being sold through Selborne Pottery.
“I did Chelsea four times, but at the moment my work doesn’t suit the Crafts Council’s profile of mainly undecorated work. I still exhibit regularly at other events in London and the South throughout the year, specialist shows like Art in Clay as well as general craft shows, especially in the weeks before Christmas. I do find that it takes a lot of organising to be away from the Pottery, though” he said, “and it’s not easy having to work a year ahead, being in the thick of it one year, whilst having to work out which shows to book for the following year.” Although several people at Selborne Pottery may work on different pieces, the result always has it’s own distinct style and appearance. Many people buy and enjoy this highly collectable pottery, attracted to and appreciating the traditional skills and classic design which will never date.
“What the general public are buying in a pot is a feeling of going back to basics,” said Robert. “Through the pot they have a sense of touching the earth, if they see it being made it’s even better, the whole process reminds them of humanity, their historical background, their roots. There is a simplicity in making a pot that people can understand, even if they are unable to make one themselves. Most people don’t understand how a computer or an engine work, but everyone can understand how a pot is made.” The classical shapes produced by Selborne Pottery that people feel so comfortable with are no accident, Robert says that form is of great importance to him in his work. “I am very specific about what I want making, I have been refining things over the years and try really hard to get it right. At the pottery I am very pleased to have other people’s input; sometimes it may be my mother decorating a piece, her work is much more figurative than mine and our styles are very different. I feel that the Pottery is very much a family of people working together to create the whole, I just steer the ship, so to speak. “I have been lucky to have become successful as a potter over the years - looking back I wonder whether I should have done more promotion to ‘establish a name’, but I’ve been happy to simply make my pots and live my life.” Last year, however, Robert caught a glimpse of what successful publicity could do for his business, when a friend carried out some PR work for him. One of the Press Releases she sent out was taken up by a national newspaper.
“They published something about one of my pots just as I was going on a family holiday to Greece,” he recalled. “It was in the colour supplement, some text, a picture of one of my jugs and my contact details. The response was overwhelming, my mobile rang with enquiries for months afterwards and I got two new galleries as well as many private buyers from it. I had so many orders from it, I even had to have some special boxes made to send them out in.”
Selborne Pottery’s range is ever expanding as collectors, both here and in America, look for new pieces to buy. “I find it difficult to drop the older designs,” explained Robert. “They are still very popular, so I find that as I develop new work, the range simply grows and grows.” Robert enjoys making something different, working to commission, and recently fulfilled a special order for the National Trust. “They commissioned a range of lustred pots which were sold in six of their best shops, including York and London. We used a leaf design in ruby red and gold lustre, which was decorated over a ‘shino’ glaze that had been reduction fired.” Earlier, in 2001, he received a prestigious commission to produce nine white stoneware bowls with platinum and gold calligraphy as awards for London First Millennium Awards. The recipients included British Airways, Metropolitan Police, Croydon Tramlink, Tate Modern and a personal bowl to Joanna Lumley for presenting the awards. The work of Robert Goldsmith is enjoyed and respected by many. Despite his years in the company of some of this country’s best known potters, the ranks of which he has joined with Selborne Pottery, Robert remains very much a family man with lots of different interests. Settled as he seems on the surface of things, he hints to me as we chat about his hankering after a completely different way of life. “I love pottery, I find that potters are universally lovely people, quite wacky most of them, and different from other craftsmen in their own way, but there are very many other things that also interest and inspire me. I would love to be a photographer, travel, go on expeditions, film for something like the BBC’s natural history programmes,” he mused. “But I should have done all of that when I was much younger!”
Maybe all is not lost though - for when I telephoned him in February, he was away on a five day course, making a Windsor chair, “just on a whim!”. The course was run by fellow Sussex Guild member James Mursell. “We met at a show in Midhurst a couple of years ago,” said Robert, “I loved his work and it’s been brilliant making my chair, learning about turning, spoke shaving, spindle making, steam bending, carving....” Perhaps this week away working with different, but similarly, natural materials, came as a breath of fresh air for Robert, releasing him temporarily from his routine work to find a sense of freedom in learning new skills and working with a different material. There is no doubt about his current path in life though, he describes himself as “very much a maker, I hate office work with a vengeance! I just want to make pots.” And make pots he does, very successfully, too!
Robert says that he is always happy to see his work in new outlets “as craft galleries do come and go”, although there are many that have been successfully selling his work for over twenty years. He will be exhibiting at bctf this year (see bctf advertisement on inside front cover). Contact Robert direct for a leaflet about his work and details of how to buy it.
Robert Goldsmith
Selborne Pottery
Selborne
Hampshire GU34 3JQ
T/F: 01420 511413
E: sales@selbornepottery.co.uk
www.selbornepottery.co.uk
