I walked around Lucie Rie: The Adventure of Pottery at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge twice. The first time I was concentrating hard, making notes, absorbing dates, places and styles. The second time, I raced around, as if I was in a shop: Heal’s some time after the second world war, say, or David Mellor in its earliest incarnation. Which things would I buy if I could? So many! A pair of stoneware teapots with bamboo handles from the 1950s. A collection of prototype cups, saucers and mugs for Wedgwood, made of its famous blue and white jasperware in 1963 but never produced. A footed bowl from 1971 of porcelain with a uranium acid yellow glaze. A tall “bottle” – a vase by any other name – from 1986 with a manganese glaze, horizontal stripes and wide lip that could somehow only be Rie’s work. All these things I would wrap in tissue, before rushing for the door, my booty over my shoulder.
Rie’s pottery is art now: extremely precious, lusted after by collectors and displayed in museums in glass cases (those at Kettle’s Yard are designed by David Kohn Architects). But no matter how exquisite, nor how rarefied the places in which one encounters it, there’s still no getting away from the fact that form and function are inseparable; that you can imagine (dream) not only of owning it, but of using it, trying hard not to worry about chips.
