The exquisite pottery of Richard Batterham

Richard Batterham died last September at the age of 85. He had worked in his pottery in the village of Durweston near Blandford Forum in Dorset for 60 years continuously. It was, in its own way, an heroic life.

Batterham took an astonishingly pure, austere approach to his work. Quite simply, he undertook every part of the process of making himself. He made his own stoneware clay bodies, arguing that those who used bought-in clay missed out on the beginning of the whole process and were mistaken to think that they could just inject their artistry at a later stage.

He threw his pots on an archaic kick-wheel. He did not decorate them, save by working the clay itself by incision, flutings and chatterings, to shape the piece and catch and display the glaze. His exquisite ash and iron glazes in greens and greys he made himself too, arriving at them by a process of trial and error, always testing, adjusting, choosing.

Despite early recognition of the excellence of his work, he eschewed all self-promotion, keeping his prices modest, to make it available for use as well as display.

When he did speak about his work, it was in the briefest, most understated and practical terms only, as I found out when trying to interview him once. He liked to talk about the pots as though they evolved almost without his conscious participation, leaving him to look at them afterwards, select what worked best and take it forward. By this process of ceaseless refinement, his work achieved extraordinary subtlety, the smallest changes of form and glaze taking on significance in the unbroken series. For the most remarkable of his austerities was that, as well as focusing his life so certainly from an early age and simplifying his working practice so decisively, he chose to make a relatively small range of pots over and over again.