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Ivar Mackay and Shire Pottery

When one hears of people who have dedicated themselves to a chosen field it often transpires that a pattern of behaviour has been established early on in their lives which overwrites any attempt by others to redirect it. School did little for Ivar Mackay other than introduce him to clay - an inspired act by his art teacher. Ivar discovered a natural aptitude for throwing.

Ivar’s family moved to Prestwood in Buckinghamshire, the same village where Michael Casson OBE, already then already one of Britain’s most respected potters, had his home studio. At the time Michael was teaching at Harrow College of Art, alongside Walter Keeler and Victor Magrie. Ivar was soon sitting in Michael’s pottery watching this modest but inspirational man at work and asking for advice.

At the time Harrow College had what was considered to be one of the best throwing courses in the Country and Ivar desperately wanted to be on it. To gain experience he took himself off to Eric Leaper’s studio in Newlyn, Cornwall, to work as an unpaid assistant for a few months. He then enrolled in pottery classes at London Metropolitan University’s Sir John Cass College to build up a portfolio of work. In 1972 he applied to Harrow. The competition was enormous. Ivar was vying for one of 15 places with as many as 100 other students.

Ivar did not win a place on the course but was championed by Michael Casson, who got him into Harrow through backdoor as a technician. Ivar spent his first year helping to teach, rushing to the library to look things up when the going got tough, which it often did!

It was in one such quick reference session that he first saw illustrations of the glaze that would lodge in his psyche, to re-emerge thirty years later when he finally gave way to his remembered ambition to work in porcelain. Celadon, that wonderful, lustrous melt-water blue; the colour of ‘sky after rain’, as the Sung Dynasty potters*1 described the glaze in their pictogramic language. Later, when this lyrical title was chosen for Ivar Mackay’s hugely successful exhibition at the Oriental Museum in Durham in 2003, Michael Casson generously wrote to Ivar on the eve of the preview wishing him well and remembering Ivar’s youthful interest in this glaze.

In his second year at Harrow Ivar was allowed to become a full time student. To the regret of his tutors he left at the end of the year. A paper qualification did not interest him. Although Ivar worked for a while as a jobbing potter it was perhaps his single-mindedness that frustrated him out of working for anybody else. Realising that he couldn’t afford to set up his own pottery studio he turned to another kind of making which required only a small quantity of materials, a corner of a room, workbench and a few tools to get going. Ivar temporarily abandoned ceramics.

Given his natural aptitude with his hands and this curious innate confidence for making that has never let him imagine he might fail, Ivar began to work in silver. For the next few years he produced contemporary jewellery and I took myself off to art school to study photography with graphics. We made leather belts together, built a house, sold it, went on holiday to see potter friends in Northumberland and never came back.

In 1980 we moved to a rented house in Hexhamshire and for a year Ivar threw himself into his first love, painting*2. I found a job working in an arts centre, whilst Ivar, now recognising a need to make some money, return to potting – initially, simply decorated domestic slipware.

I became Ivar’s administrator, pot-finisher, warehouser, saleswoman, and delivery person. Once a week I drove up to the Sunday craft market at Jesmond, and whatever the weather set out my stall and sold our pots. When Ivar invented a set of five graded wall pots that sat inside each other like a Russian doll the public snapped them up as fast as we made them. Domestic ware quickly gave way to flowerpots as we responded to demand. We began to wholesale a range of tubs, wall planters and strawberry and herb pots to garden centres. Our rented house was drowned in clay and pots.

We moved into a flat and began to rent an industrial unit in the old goods yard of the station at Corbridge, where we built a 120 cu ft brick arch kiln, piped in 2 inch mains gas and began a seventeen year period of making, during which we expanded our range of garden pots to fifty-four styles, and produced a quarter of a million hand-thrown pieces.

By the mid-1990’s we were supplying garden centres all over England and southern Scotland. We regularly sent truckloads down to the central warehouse of John Lewis Plc and had begun to export our range to Japan. Our workforce swelled to four and a cat. We had a forklift truck, storage unit and containers, and began importing a range of standard flowerpots from Italy to pay for the extra help. We merchandised and provided display stands, bar-coded labels and promotional literature.

Just as all the cheap factory-made pots started to roll in from China and Korea we were sending our high quality hand-thrown pots to Japan – somewhere in the region of 5,000 pieces exported by the time we ground to a halt. If you had asked us if we were happy we would have told you that we had no time to answer. In truth we were far from happy, trapped like Egyptian tomb-builders - well fed, warmly housed and tied to a monotonous, repetitive process which required skill but no inspiration.

In 1998, as the garden pot market was becoming overwhelmed by imports Ivar announced that he was going to rig up a plastic clean tent in the storeroom and start experimenting with porcelain. Within a couple of weeks he had announced that there was to be no more terracotta.

Switching from working in raw terracotta to reduction fired porcelain is like getting out of a Ford Fiesta and climbing into a Formula 1 racing car. Once more, Ivar’s inner voice told him just to get on with it. We washed down the pottery, improvised a portable porcelain kiln and Ivar was off again, newly incarnated as a porcelain potter. His glazing booth was a large cardboard box.

Ivar struggled for the rest of the year. Having worked deliberately heavy for so long in terracotta, (flimsy flowerpots are nasty), his early porcelain was neanderthal. Learning the reduction processes necessary to produce celadon and copper red glazes drove him to distraction. He persevered and eventually good pieces began to emerge. I remember the first time he pulled a glacial blue celadon out of the kiln I rushed down to Corbridge and waved it under the nose of one of our friends. For the rest of that year I went back to the Armstrong Bridge Craft Market to test the public reaction to Ivar’s new porcelain and we began a search for combined workshop retail premises.

In the winter of 1998, supported by a small grant from the Arts Council, we held Ivar’s first exhibition in the library at the Queen’s Hall Arts Centre. Corrymella Scott in Newcastle gave Ivar his second show.

It was while I was recovering from knee surgery that I spotted details of a possible site for development in Alnwick. An old hardware shop with workshops behind, it had the scale and scope to make a wonderful art gallery and studio with flat above, and there was plenty of storage space that could be developed at a later date.

Property in Alnwick was cheap and grants were available. We put our Hexham flat on the market, put in a successful bid, and in March 1999 we packed up home, workshop, and remaining stock of flowerpots and fetched up in Alnwick.

For four months we lived in a draughty old tin shed while we helped our builders refit our premises. We found reclaimed wood in a yard in East Bolden and laid the floor of the gallery. I designed the lighting, wall hanging arrangements, plinth and window display, set up the computer system, organised road signage and established press links, whilst Ivar arranged his workshop, commissioned his kiln and began to produce pots. In October 1999 Her Grace the Duchess of Northumberland opened our first exhibition of paintings and porcelain.

Ivar’s classically driven work sat beautifully alongside fine contemporary art, and with an on-going and varied programme of exhibitions to tempt new audiences to our gallery we rapidly expanded our mailing list. Soon other galleries wanted to show Ivar’s porcelain, and with several successful external solo shows under his belt, and his work in demand by collectors from all over the world, Ivar at last began to realise the potential Michael Casson had seen in him thirty years earlier.

After forty-six wonderful and diverse exhibitions of contemporary art, we closed our gallery doors in January 2006 to concentrate on Ivar’s burgeoning external exhibition programme. You can view details of some of these shows in the news & archive pages of this web site.

We do still welcome visitors to Ivar’s home studio. To view Ivar Mackay’s hand-thrown porcelain at Shire Pottery you will need to make an appointment during normal working hours. Phone +44 (0)1665 602277 or email us at ivar.porcelain@btconnect.com to arrange a mutually convenient time.

fsw / January 2007

*1   The Sung Dynasty of ancient China, (960 – 1279 AD), produced some of the most beautiful and sophisticated ceramics of any time in the history of making. The Sung potters understood perfectly the natural symbiosis between form and the decorated surface and were imaginative and painterly in their use of glaze. They were dedicated and exploratory in their practice, prodigious in their output and their work was highly prized.

*2   Although his tutors at Harrow College instilled a disciplined approach to throwing in Ivar, which set him up for the long years he spent as a production thrower, their influence cannot be said to have directed his route into porcelain. Ivar has always loved colour. In painting his early inspiration came primarily from the Impressionists – Bonnard, Degas, Gaugin, Manet, Monet, Seurat and Van Gogh. Other painters like Rembrandt and Mark Rothko used layers of transparency and colour in their painting technique to create luminosity. Ivar has approached glazes like copper red and celadon in much the same way.