info@studio-pots.com	Harlequin Gallery
Nic Collins New Wood-fired Stoneware 10th April to 1st May 2005
Examples of work still available after the Private View: -
No.5 - Large bottle, shino glaze, sea shell and wad marks plus natural ash runs. Height: 56cm (22”)		No.4 – Large Bowl fired under stoke hole with natural ash and shino glaze. Diameter: 50cm (19.7”)
No.67 – Square platter with shino glaze and sea shell wadding. Dimensions: 27.3cm by 27.3cm (10.75” by 10.75”)		No. 35 – Tea bowl. Height: 10.2cm (4”) Width: 9.5cm (3.75”)
No.31 – Bottle with shino glaze and sea shell wad marks. Height: 15.25cm (6”) SOLD		No.1 - Tall bottle fired on side with sea shell wads and blue brown ash runs. Height: 96cm (37.8”)
No.19 – Small slab bottle, ash encrusted – fired in the fire box. Height: 22.9cm (9”)		No.60 – Bellarmine type bottle. Height: 31.1cm (12.25”)
The pots of Nic Collins form part of my everyday life. When I wake in the morning it is usually one of Nic Collins' large jars with rivulets of ash glaze running down it that is the first thing I see. I will then get up to make coffee and always have this from one of Nic's mugs that I bought from him when he still potted at Powdermill in the middle of Dartmoor. Today Nic lives in Moretonhampstead, a small town on the edge of Dartmoor that was built long before the motor car was thought of. There hidden away in a valley at the edge of town is the pottery that Nic Collins shares with his partner Sabine and their daughter, who was born last November. Wood firing pottery, as practised by Nic, predates Moretonhampstead by many thousands of years but in Britain and other industrialised countries it almost died out completely in the last century. The firing process requires total commitment for several days and I suspect that this real involvement in the last and in some ways the most important stage of pottery making is one of the major attractions that lead Nic and other potters to fire in this way. It is largely the fly ash from the burning wood that settles on the pots, fluxes and melts on the pot surface to form the natural ash glaze that characterises the work from Nic's anagama style kiln. Clearly the positioning of the pots, their shape, the space between them, the length of firing, kiln design and the clay used all contribute to the end product. As Herbert Read stated many years ago "pottery is plastic art in its most abstract form”. To continue this argument further, wood firing is undoubtedly abstraction abstracted and to my mind is at the real cutting edge of art today. Besides traditional Shigaraki and Iga fired work from Japan, Nic is also influenced by medieval European pottery that manifests itself in the shape of his jugs and in some of the Bellarmine type bottles that he makes. Another aspect of Nic's working philosophy is to use local materials whenever possible and the bulk of the clay for his pots comes from the Meeth quarries near Okehampton, just a few miles north west of his pottery.
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