The Love of His Life: Malcolm Wright
October 10, 2016
Decades of creating functional and abstract works in clay havenât dimmed the enthusiasm world-renowned Vermont potter Malcolm Wright has for his craft.
Text by Robert Kiener
Artist Malcolm Wright
At the end of a meandering dirt road in the backwoods of southern Vermont, in a white-walled, oak-floored second-floor gallery above a post-and-beam studio, Malcolm Wright, surrounded by scores of pieces of his potteryâa virtual retrospective of his lifeâs workâreveals what he calls his âbig secret.â
As he describes how he crafted one of his more abstract pieces, Wright pauses, then confesses, âThere should be a law. No one should have this much fun. Itâs so wonderful to come out here every morning and have no idea what I am going to make.â
By the glint in his eye itâs clear that the seventy-seven-year-old Wright has lost none of the fascination with clay and its limitless possibilities that have been the hallmarks of his award-winning work. His wood-fired glazed potteryâfrom traditional stoneware to Japanese-inspired Karatsu functional bowls, plates, and vases to his more recent abstract sculptural workâis highly sought after and is included in collections as varied as the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Tokyoâs Idemitsu Museum of Arts, and Bostonâs Museum of Fine Arts. Heâs often been called an American master, and as one art critic noted, âHis ceramic sculpture and vessels are alive with monumental presence.â
Examining Wrightâs lifetime of work, it is clear that much of it has been influenced by the eight years he studied under Japanese teachers in the 1960s, including three years he spent with his wife, Marjorie, in Kyoto and Karatsu as an apprentice under the twelfth-generation Karatsu master potter and Japanese Living National Treasure Taroemon Nakazato. As he explains, âFor years my work reflected my deep involvement with Japan, functional pottery for food and flowers in the ascetic, restrained taste of tea ceremony pottery.â
While much of his work has its roots in Japan, he has branched out as he has explored, and returned to, earlier Western modernist influences such as cubism, abstract expressionism, and constructivism. âThe older I got the more I âwent off the railsâ in crazy directions as I experimented,â he explains with a broad smile as he shows off an elegant, sinuous sculptural piece made (âassembled and reassembled,â as he says) from extruded tubes of clay. âIn addition to my Japanese-influenced, functional pieces, which I have continued to produce, Iâve also done these more sculptural, abstract pieces,â he says. âThe earliest ones were geometric, with hard edges and smooth surfaces, but I then began producing looser, even more abstract forms.â
Wright explains that much of his free-form, sculptural work is a product of his intuition. âThey are all about solving problems and making discoveries,â he says. âEach piece also reflects how you feel about life that day.â
He has also worked in bronze. âIt has a feeling of permanence, which I am attracted to,â says Wright.
Both his traditional glazed stoneware and abstract pieces have one characteristic in common: surprise. âPottery is unpredictable. You never know how a piece will turn out until you take it out of the kiln,â he says.
Too high, or too low, a temperature in the kiln can affect coloration. An unevenly applied slip may blister or peel. âI have a partnership with fire and my kiln,â says Wright. âIâve learned to give up control like one does with oneâs children and am open to a sense of wonder when I open up the kiln.â
He fires his work, made from Georgia red brick clay, stoneware, and porcelain, in a kiln he built in the 1970s after returning from Japan. The multi-chambered kiln, based on an ancient Korean style called split bamboo, is twenty-one feet long and six feet wide and can hold hundreds of pieces. It takes several days to fire it up to the necessary temperature of 2,000 to 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit.
In recent years, Wright has cut back on his production, but not his art. Moving from the potterâs wheel, which he describes as âfluid, quick, and free,â to the more free-form, abstract hand-building keeps him drawn to all the possibilities of clay. âI never get tired of the search,â he says. âI am always searching for what the clay wants to become.â â˘
editorâs note: To see more of Malcolm Wrightâs work, visit theturnpikeroad.com
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