In 1865 Barbara Bodichon, the feminist writer, artist and traveler, wrote of the pottery in Kabylie in Africa:

The exquisite water jars . . . will be without doubt replaced in a few years by ugly jugs, or tin cans, or wooden buckets and yokes: and the oil jar and the rest of their beautiful forms will give way before hideous and cheap French earthenware.

But Bodichon was wrong. One hundred and fifty years later Berber women are still making fine pottery. Although the technology remains much the same, forms have evolved as makers respond to the changing exigencies of modern markets.

It is little known that women are the main producers of pottery in many societies around the world. Because of the technology used and the domestic and functional nature of the wares, women’s ceramics lack prestige and have been neglected by scholars and collectors. [1] By contrast, World Ceramics: Transforming Women’s Traditions celebrates women’s work. The exhibition seeks to demonstrate that women ceramists are not trapped in a disappearing past but are vital participants in our changing world, renewing old ways by embracing new materials and techniques, and shifting shapes in response to new markets. What is conventionally deemed women’s ceramics is no longer defined by isolation and continuity. Makers in Africa, South and Central America, the American Southwest, the Caribbean, and Indonesia encounter the wider world through tourism, scholarship, and economic development schemes. Further, individual artists active in the Western gallery and museum system but connected to traditional cultures through family or ancestry are transforming not only aesthetic practices, but also basic definitions of value and media. This essay traces some of the trajectories along which traditional functional pottery can travel as it moves out from its homely environment to take on new functions, signalling new meanings and becoming upwardly mobile. 

The Exhibition and Display

World Ceramics: Transforming Women’s Traditions comprises two parallel and interlinked exhibitions, one at the Carleton College Art Gallery in Northfield, the other at the Northern Clay Center in Minneapolis. World Ceramics explores the creative expression of ceramists whose work is rooted in traditional pottery made by women. The makers—women and a few men—are from four continents and represent selected places, artists, or traditions. The displays at both venues offer juxtapositions aimed not only to trigger surprise and delight but also to stimulate thinking about change. A functional beer pot made for drinking is shown alongside a refined, burnished vessel aimed at the art market. A beautiful black Pueblo wedding jar from North America contrasts with a similar double form from Algeria.

Ceramics are more than dumb objects. Figurines are the earliest form of fired clay found in many cultures, functioning as fetish and fertility symbol, as toy or trinket. Ceramic containers are among the most familiar human artifacts, supporting the basics of human life, from carrying water to food preparation. Functional vessels also play symbolic roles linked to rites of passage.  They can become placenta pots, wedding jars, and burial urns. Pots are items of exchange between persons, families, villages, and cultures. Ceramics are mediators of meaning when presented in domestic display, as diplomatic gifts, as trophies of travel, and tourist souvenirs.

Women’s Ceramics and New Markets

Visual culture is understood in the West in terms of hierarchical classification systems and oppositional categories including high culture and popular culture, fine art and craft, aesthetic and functional, contemporary and traditional. While the current exhibition cannot escape value-laden assumptions, viewers are invited to question categories and challenge implicit judgements. The makers celebrated in World Ceramics come from different continents and are divided further by the imbalance of power between the West and the developing world. With limited access to formal education, many women potters learn their craft from mothers and aunts in a village context. Despite a seeming lack of choice in matters of lifestyle and training, these women have found ways to transform their ceramic practices. By contrast, a smaller number of featured makers have benefited fully from long years of art education and opportunities to travel. These artists, while free to make any form of contemporary ceramics, have chosen to reference traditional forms and processes in their work.

Traditional women potters integrate ceramic production into the daily and seasonal rhythms of their lives. Pots are produced for personal and family use and ceramic vessels are offered for sale or barter locally. While this type of self-contained local market still survives in places around the world, it is increasingly rare in the 21st century. Today, pottery is a specialized activity practiced by certain women or families from pottery villages or communities. Even though most women’s pottery is low fired and difficult to transport, these wares have made their way into global marketplaces. Special design qualities, consistent quality, favorable currency exchange rates, and effective marketing schemes can outweigh obstacles to export, as the pottery of Lombok, Indonesia, or La Chamba, Columbia, demonstrates.

The global market requires a level of quality control. Potters are encouraged to tidy the forms and smooth the edges. Skill is privileged, sometimes at the expense of liveliness. In societies where nearly everything is made by machine, a high standard of finish is expected. In village culture, where most things are handmade, there are fewer obsessions with precision. Slight imperfections and unevenness, although sometimes embraced as an antidote to mass-production, can be unsettling to a Western eye.

As running water and metal pans become available, the demand for water storage and cooking pots declines. New local opportunities often are found in producing planters and items for domestic display. Commercial painted decoration adds additional appeal for local buyers. It is potentially much more lucrative to cater for art collectors through the gallery system. Careful not to sacrifice the ethnic look, ceramists create highly crafted, elegant objects worthy of the connoisseur’s gaze. For a tourist market or a collector’s market a good story is an asset. Helen Cordero’s memory of her grandfather inspired the original ‘Pueblo Storyteller’ in the 1960s and launched the first of many versions on the theme.

Of all women’s pottery traditions the best documented over many centuries is that of Native American pottery of the Southwest. By contrast, in Africa and Asia, the history is much less recorded. This exhibition seeks to uncover some of the history and strategies used to support and develop women’s work and invites musings on the cultural authority behind a value system that celebrates the authentic and traditional while dismissing the touristy and commercial. Tradition is a problematic word suggesting an unchanging and static culture. It is important to recognize, however, that all traditions are invented and many of the most hallowed are of more recent origin than is widely known.  

All of the objects in the exhibition were created for sale, some offered at local markets, others for outside consumption through tourism and global trade, and some targeting the Western art audience through galleries. One might condemn marketing tradition as a cynical ploy. Or one can acknowledge the self-conscious engagement with longstanding practices as a sign of pride in the maker’s cultural heritage. This exhibition demonstrates that outside attention can stimulate not only market production and innovation but individual creativity as well. 

Tourism

As global tourism expands, the demand for souvenirs increases. Pottery made by low-fire methods may seem ill suited to this market, but women potters have found ways to adapt their goods and marketing systems to suit buyers from outside the local area. Typical forms may be downsized or even miniaturized to fit new uses in domestic decoration. Although there is a risk that mass tourism can overwhelm small communities, craft villages can become major visitor attractions, offering special events and demonstrations as at San Bartolo in Oaxaca or in the New Mexico pueblos. In Lombok, Indonesia, bus tours to three pottery villages are organized out of Mataram, the capital city. In Siruga in northern Ghana, which is far from the main tourist routes, outside visitors to the pottery cooperative can stay in the village and take craft classes. Local people are encouraged to keep their compounds well decorated in the traditional way.  

Development Projects

Pottery villages are effective vessels for economic development programs. Often initiated by local or national governments, outside advisers are brought in to assist. These schemes have had a mixed record of success. The implication of introducing new technology is often imperfectly understood. Wheel throwing requires more time to prepare sufficiently refined clay, kilns require long hours of firing and more expensive fuel, and there are gender implications in new systems of working. In different projects on different continents I have seen kilns standing unused, wheels abandoned, and electric pug mills in a central building too far from where the potters work. Economic development schemes are hard to get right.

The Lombok Pottery Centre in Indonesia was set up in 1988 as a joint initiative with New Zealand. Led by Jean McKinnon, it represents a successful partnership between village makers and advisers by seeking to leverage an existing pottery culture as an economic development engine for the region. The advisers recommended small adjustments to the clay and improvements to firing sheds but did not seek to import new technologies or change the way women worked from the home. The Lombok Pottery Centre helps with quality control, marketing, and design, but respects the essential look of the island’s pottery. Women administer the program, working closely with the village potters (women and some men) who are offered sufficient financial incentives to maintain a high quality of work.

Technology

The technologies used by women are remarkably universal. The clay usually is found locally and prepared in small quantities by foot and hand, but rarely with the help of machinery. The pots are built up from the ground, or on a concave base such as an old pot or a low hand wheel that swivels but pots are rarely thrown using centrifugal force. In some parts of the world, a paddle and anvil also are used to pull out the form, although this technique is declining in use. Professional potters usually work very quickly and can build a medium-sized pot in minutes. The finishing may take longer to smooth down the form and, very commonly, to burnish it and seal the outer surface. After being left to dry, pots are fired in an open fire, sometimes in a hollow or pit, and sometimes in a low-walled circle or even an up draught kiln with an open floor. Open firing uses materials that are available locally, such as dung, rice straw, palm fronds, dried grass, and wood. It is notable that most of the materials are low-cost waste products that do not involve felling trees. Black-smoke firing is a characteristic finish dating back to the earliest times and is still found in many parts of the world, from Indonesia and Africa to the Americas. There are various methods of achieving this, but typically the pots are lifted on long poles from the hot ashes of the bonfire and plunged into sawdust or vegetable matter. 

Glaze is rarely used on women’s pottery, as it normally requires a kiln firing. Decoration, usually of an abstract nature, is applied using roulettes, or other simple engraving tools. Natural slips or coloured rocks are used for painted decoration—mainly white, black, and red—and sometimes a natural resin is painted on to give a shiny finish. Commercial paints also are used but may be problematic for the market. [2]

Gender

This exhibition considers gender issues and looks at the processes whereby men take up pottery in societies where it is normally women’s work. In many places men help with digging and preparing clay, firing, and marketing, especially when the business has good economic returns. As men often have better access to education and own or control the donkeys, trucks, and other means of transport, they are well positioned to set up shops and businesses. Anything having to do with technological equipment is likely to involve men. For example, in Lombok, potters have begun to spray tamarind water on the hot wares to give them a rich dappled surface. This liquid is applied using an agricultural sprayer strapped on the back, a task that seems to have been assigned to young men.

Men are attracted to pottery production as the work develops higher social status and they usually contribute in ways that give distinction or add value to the wares. Thus, as in Lombok, men often do modelling and sculpture. Or, to give an historical example, among the African Mangbetu people, it is thought that men modelled the heads on pots made by women. [3] Male workers most frequently contribute to women’s pottery production by decorating it in elaborate or different ways to cater for new markets. Among the Pueblo peoples, men were first involved mainly as decorators, as in the case of Julian Martinez. Only in the mid-20th century, when the economic rewards became clear, did Native American men take up the work. In Lombok it is often men who seem to be developing new forms of decoration, from engraving to painting with commercial colors to applying colored sand designs. 

Geographies

There are clear patterns to the geography and history of women’s pottery traditions. In a great sweep through Europe, the Middle East, India, China, and Japan, pottery production has long been based on the male technology of wheels and kilns. In these regions, women’s pottery can be documented in pockets, almost as an anomaly, as in Denmark, Cyprus or Spain, and Turkey. Women potters predominate in Africa, the Americas, and parts of southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, where indigenous potters use hand building and open firing technology.

Trajectories

In this final section I want to return to the idea of the trajectory. From earliest times ceramics have been portable commodities, from humble oil and wine containers to high-class Asian porcelain for the European collector. With industrialization and factory produced ceramics, country potteries began to disappear. The studio potter emerged in the early 20th century, and was no mere artisan but a middle-class, educated person whose work was based on ideologies of practice, typically using the wheel and the kiln. Studio ceramics drew strongly on the male Asian and European traditions of pottery production. [4]

Where do women’s traditions fit in this story? In an iconic 1952 photograph, Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada, great masters of British and Japanese studio pottery, respectively, paid their respects to the grand Pueblo matriarch, Maria Martinez, as they stand together by her firing site. A decade later, Nigerian Ladi Kwali gained an international reputation as she toured Europe, the United Kingdom, and North America, demonstrating her distinctive method of hand building. But in the context of studio pottery these women were seen as exotic anomalies with limited impact on the mainstream.

Among the many women’s traditions in ceramics, Pueblo pottery is the oldest and most developed pottery industry that has successfully exploited the North American passion for collecting. In the early 20th century, archaeologists, anthropologists, and philanthropists became increasingly influential. They encouraged key potters such as Maria Martinez to refine their work, eliminate more recent influences, and reinvent designs inspired by earlier historical and archaeological pieces. Prizes awarded at the Indian Market in Santa Fe, New Mexico, helped to consolidate these values. Until the 1980s the judges were mainly Anglo dealers and museum professionals. The whole dilemma of authenticity plays out in myriad ways among Pueblo potters. Potters identify themselves with a particular Pueblo and proudly trace their inheritance back to one or more of the grand matriarchs. Debates rage about whether a work deserves its Native American credentials if it is produced by electric kiln rather than open firing, or by slip-cast molds rather than hand building. In spite of this, Pueblo pottery always has been remarkably innovative.

Ceramists such as Roxanne Swenzell, Nora Naranjo-Morse, Anita Fields, and Diego Romero are cast in a new mold. They have been trained in colleges and universities, and have the choice to become artists like any other in North America. Or each can capitalize on their heritage by creating work that addresses political concerns or identity issues. In this self-conscious use of tradition, their work aligns with much international contemporary art, incorporating borrowed imagery and drawing on postmodern intertextuality.

When Michael Cardew set up a pottery at Abuja in Nigeria he mainly apprenticed young men to learn the business of a pottery based on wheel throwing and wood-fired kilns. Ladi Kwali was a skilled local potter. She struggled at first with the new techniques but soon became competent in both systems, winning acclaim and earning academic honors. [5] At times, her ceramics were the financial mainstay of the Abuja Pottery (now known as Ladi Kwali Pottery), and represent a fascinating hybrid of African form and European studio pottery. Kwali’s signature work is the Gwari-style form and decoration applied to a glazed stoneware pot.

Magdalene Odundo, born and raised in Kenya, acknowledges a huge debt to both Ladi Kwali and Maria Martinez, whom she first met at a summer school in Idyllwild, California. Odundo never forgot Martinez’s precise forms and rich burnished surfaces. Odundo went to England in her 20s and trained in ceramics at Farnham and the Royal College of Art. Although her work does not flow directly from her Kenyan upbringing or family inheritance, she does reference indigenous ceramic traditions. The artist’s borrowings can be as diverse as Mangbetu face pots, Elizabethan costumes, or African metalwork. As a student she spent three months at the Abuja Pottery in Nigeria where she learned to throw but also to hand build. Odundo still uses the Gwari system she learned from Ladi Kwali while at Abuja. Now Odundo increasingly is involved in teaching and supporting emerging African artists such as Clive Sithole.

Nesta Nala’s story has remarkable similarities to that of Maria Martinez. Encouraged by advisers at the Swedish mission at Vukani and others, she began to develop a style based on designs found by archaeologists in the area. From an early stage she directed her work towards the gallery and collector market. Her daughters, Jabu, Thembi, and Zanele, have developed her style further, but Nala’s influence extends well beyond her immediate family. Clive Sithole learned from her and, more surprisingly, so did Ian Garrett. As a white South African student in the late Apartheid period he wrote his dissertation on Nesta Nala and adopted her method of hand building. Garrett’s choice to use an indigenous African technique at that time is surely an expression of personal and political identity.

Like Odundo, Helga Gamboa, also now resident of the United Kingdom, was educated in ceramics at a British university. As an artist, she seeks to retrieve some of her culture lost to colonialism by studying contemporary and historical Angolan pottery. Taking on a political stance, she uses ceramic technique as a metaphor for the colonial and post-colonial process. Gamboa’s vessels combine hand-coiled burnished techniques (Africa) with tin-glaze (Portugal/Europe) and photographic transfer prints of people who have suffered because of land mines and civil war.

Winnie Owens Hart, an African American, looks to African ceramics for imagery and forms that allow her to address issues of identity and diaspora. She is the proud owner of a Ladi Kwali pot made while the Nigerian artist was on tour in the United States.

Throughout the 20th century women potters have demonstrated their techniques in association with museums. In 1911 Maria Martinez and her husband Julian participated in this form of ethnographic spectacle at the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe. At the other end of the century, in 1999, Nesta Nala appeared at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, D.C., an event that frequently presents traditional potters. Among studio potters and ceramists, demonstrations became increasingly popular at summer schools, workshops, and potters conventions, where demonstrator and audience are bonded by a mutual interest in technique. For the traditional potters it is an opportunity to travel and see new types of work; for the audience it is a revelation to see the dexterity and skill in simple hand building and open firing. Catty Osman and Irena Alphonse, both of whom are from St. Lucia, have demonstrated in the United States on several occasions; Sabiha Ayari of Tunisia has demonstrated in France and the United Kingdom, while Estella Dagua and Miriam Vargas, after several earlier visits to the United States, were artists-in-residence in 2005 at the Archie Bray Foundation. The residency in Montana offered a longer period to develop their own work alongside an international group of ceramists.

Women potters are gaining a higher profile. Women’s work undoubtedly influenced the explosion of interest in hand-built and burnished pottery that emerged in the early 1980s. The Western Modernist canon is undermined increasingly as new issues and ideas come forward in the 21st century. Artists from previously marginalized communities can draw on an expanding heritage and find a new international audience. The skills and vision of traditional women potters have the power to energize and transform others. They too can play their part in the new ceramics.

Footnotes

[1] It is surprising how little the literature of feminism has made of ceramics, given that in recent world history it is still a field heavily dominated by female producers. In their survey of gender and work, Murdock (1973) showed that women were the designated potters in 76 percent of the societies where ceramics were made. See also Ronald Duncan in Crafting Gender 2003: 129–131.

[2] For a discussion of this in relation to pottery in KwaZulu Natal see Elizabeth Perrill, “IKS & Zulu Ceramic Arts: Azolina BaMncube Ngema, One Woman’s Story” in Interpreting Ceramics, Issue 10

[3] The Mangbetu are in the country now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo. See Vincentelli 2003:50.

[4] It is notable that women potters such as Ruth Duckworth were in the forefront of promoting hand building, beginning in the 1960s.

[5] Ladi Kwali was awarded an MBE from Britain in 1962 and a DLitt by Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria.

Note

Related essays, published following Gender and Ceramics: Old Forms and New Markets, a symposium held at Aberystwyth University in 2007, accompany this exhibition and catalogue. The essays can be found online in Interpreting Ceramics, Issue 10.

References

Agebria, John, Ladi Kwali, A Study of Indigenous and Modern Techniques of Abuja Pottery, Ibadan, Kraft Books, 2005
Barta, Eli (ed.), Crafting Gender: Women and Folk Art in Latin America and the Caribbean, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2003
Batkin, Jonathan, Clay People, Santa Fe, Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, 1999
Clark, Garth, Free Spirit: the New Native American Potter, Hertogenbosch, Stedelijk Museum, 2006
McKinnon, Jean, Vessels of Life: Lombok Earthenware, Denpasar, Bali, Indonesia, Saritaksu Press, 1996
Murdock, George, “Factors in the division of labour by sex: a cross-cultural analysis,” Ethnology, 1973, 12, 2:203–5
Slayter-Ralph, Anthony, Magdalene Odundo, Aldershot, Lund Humphries, 2004
Vincentelli, Moira, Women Potters Transforming Traditions, London, A&C Black, 2003