Essay by Emma Crichton-Miller

When Paul Philp’s brother, the art dealer Richard Philp, first began to show Paul’s work at art fairs, in the 1990s, people would ask, “From what culture do these come?”  The confusion is understandable. Philp’s pots are painstakingly built by hand in a fashion dating back to the earliest human cultures. Their stoneware surfaces are treated variously with incremental layers of oxides, wood ash glaze and slip, through multiple high temperature firings, giving them the highly-textured, sometimes encrusted, appearance of natural objects or relics newly dug from the ground. Their colours are muted but never dull, ranging from the dark blues and greys of stormy skies to a chalky white and the forms echo archaic shapes, of ancient vessels and dwellings. They breathe in sympathy with our deft and ingenious ancestors. And yet, these objects are definitively modern.  Each is unique and uniquely expressive - there is nothing generic about them. Some play with our perception of space, seeming to tease us with a dimension half way between two and three.  Others have asymmetric profiles or sloping lips, irregular ridges or grooves, curved indentations or unusual angles that declare the artist’s creative decision-making at each turning point in the process.  Even where the shapes derive from traditional ceramic forms, the surface becomes a place for experimentation.

Paul Philp is quite clear. “I am seeking a restrained, classical feeling  - but classical in the British Modernist sense of Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicolson.”

Philp who turned eighty this year  has been a potter for most of his adult life, but it is over the last thirty-two years that he has truly discovered his medium. Brought up in the Welsh countryside, the son of a well-known antiques dealer, Philp remembers his father returning home, when he was about fifteen, with an astonishing collection of Tang Dynasty ceramics. Inspired by these objects, Philp discovered Bernard Leach and St.Ives, choosing in his later teenage years to spend his summers potting in St Ives.  Aged eighteen he took a summer job at the Crowan Pottery, in Cornwall, with Harry Davis, making refined stoneware functional pieces and getting to know the local potters. After a period working in the family business in Cardiff, Philp went to Cardiff Art School for a year to study ceramics. A small inheritance enabled him to buy a cottage, stable block and coach house in Glamorgan near the sea, where he began making functional ware. Married young, and with small children, it was a struggle to earn a living, and after a stint in London, where he mainly designed and built gardens, Philp and his wife took the opportunity to buy a ruined farmhouse and mill in Monmouthshire. Philp says, “That house saved my life.” For fifteen years, he rebuilt it lovingly, using salvaged, traditional materials, with a passion for the authenticity of the place, its buildings and its landscape. He and his family lived there without electricity, self-sufficiently growing vegetables and raising chickens, pigs and even some sheep.

The fascination with clay had not left him however. In 1989, Philp bought a generator and a small kiln and began to make pots. Having found it hard to make a living by catering to an unknown audience, he tried instead to make work that would suit him. “I imagined a gallery in St Ives and what my pots would look like in that space.” He adds, “I love the natural textures of stone and the different effects that nature produces. I wanted to combine classical form with natural, rugged surfaces.”  The smallness of the electric kiln means that he can carefully control every aspect of the process of each pot - a mastery he enjoys. He recognises the affinity of his work with many continental makers, who also cherish clay’s ancient origins, but his work draws too on his deep interests in ancient cultures and the history of art.

In 2010 Philp moved to Bath where he has created another beautiful studio and home around a tiny courtyard, from two stables. Here he continues to make the pots which have won him audiences internationally but also to experiment with new forms and materials - including alabaster.  One recent new departure has been the creation of wall pieces that echo the calm abstract shallow reliefs of Ben Nicolson. As Philp puts it, “I have a very restless mind. I do have to try things.”