Following the Fire

摘要

On a sideboard in my living room I have a small group of pots. There is a Mike Dodd bowl, all flowing ash-glaze and cracked white slip; a Japanese Bizen unomi (tall narrow teabowl), fine and muscular in lustrous brown; and a small stoneware teabowl by Deiniol Williams. I bought it in 2004, from the backroom sale at the Manchester School of Art degree show. Over the years this little bowl has stayed with me. There is something about the way it sits, wide and flat on a narrow foot, lifted by a slight taper, only just discernible in its straight-sided walls. Delicately banded in a black that bleeds and drips into soft grey-green, speckled with iron, its surface evokes the textures of lichens, grasses, stone. I have often looked at this little bowl and wondered what Williams did next. And so, ten years later, I went to meet him, in a terraced house in Glossop in the High Peak.