Master of his medium

By KIM KNIGHT - Sunday Star Times

Potter Len Castle puts heart, soul and sweat into every work. The 80-something icon tells us how he lets the clay have its say.

Clay is unctuous. Clay is slippery and plastic and gritty.

But these are just words. And nearly 80 years after Len Castle sat under a pohutukawa tree and rolled sticky white mud into marbles, the master potter still struggles to find the right ones to explain the medium that has made him world famous.

"You can never describe the subtleties of its behaviour. Only your fingers will tell you."

These are the hands that have caressed and tortured hundreds of tonnes of clay: slender, white, and as furrowed as the forms he subjects to fire and glaze. They pull bird wings from the earth and make volcanic lakes from a swill of copper and sodium. Sorcerer's hands?

"My wish was to create pots, to become a member of an ancient lineage of potters magicians who used elemental substances, earth, fire, air and water."

Last Wednesday, Castle's fingernails were clean of clay and turning the pages of the newest book about his work. Making the Molecules Dance, published by Lopdell House Gallery, is up for a Montana award on July 27. The book, he says, is a "miscellany", filling in some of the blanks from Len Castle: Potter which picked up a non-fiction gong in 2003.

Castle is quietly pleased. This time, he's a finalist with fellow artists, photographer Peter Peryer and painter John Reynolds, in the illustrative section.

"In the realm of the history of art in New Zealand, they are very important books. Tough competitors."

But in the potting world, Castle, 84, has no equal. He has been awarded a CBE and is a member of the Distinguished Companion of New Zealand Order of Merit List. In 2003, he became one of 10 official Art Icons.

"I felt... chuffed."

He's quite small for an icon. A gentlemanly slip of a man with a persistent cough but sparkly eyes, who insists on paying for his own coffee and knows the Titirangi cafe staff by first name.

"I am an explorer by nature," says Castle, introducing a career that traverses the production of tableware for British potter Bernard Leach's St Ives studio in Cornwall, to the creation of "sea secrets" and "earth books" sculptural pieces reflecting his love of nature.

In the new book, photographs of geothermal areas and lichens sit alongside the clay works they later inspired. The lichens are a "personal indulgence".

"This one was photographed in the 1950s," he says, pointing to a glossy page. "I was intrigued with the pattern, and later, when I learnt more of the biology, I found there was a warfare going on. The black lines represent the fronts of two expanding colonies. Each secretes chemical substances that inhibit the growth of the other and so they reach a point of stability."

Sometimes, it's very easy to imagine Castle as the science teacher he once was.

He was 10 when, inspired by potter Olive Jones at the 1934 Auckland Easter Show, he attempted to build a potter's wheel from a dismantled scooter. But it wasn't until 1947, as a Teachers' Training College student, he took a pottery night class at Avondale College.

"I think if it hadn't been for Bob [Robert Nettleton] Field's evening classes and the connections I made, I would have drifted towards painting... I did dabble with water colours for a while, but then the lure of working clay and fire completely took over."

Castle first exhibited in 1949. A work sold. Weeks later, he discovered the mystery buyer was his mother.

"I was so elated somebody would hand over money for something I had made. It gave me the confidence to carry on. The locals probably used to think I was a bit loopy. I used to take a wheelbarrow down the suburban streets of Westmere, park it up on the footpath then disappear down a bank to the beach, dig my clay from beneath the sand, carry it up in sacks and wheelbarrow it home."

In 1963, he left a Teachers' College science lecturer's job and became a professional potter. It was a risky venture, supported by his then wife, Ruth.

"I knew that I would have to make repeatable wares if we were going to live. Teapots, coffee mugs and so on. I went down to the old Crown Lynn works and there was a deposit of very fine white plastic clay."

He bought a tonne for 10 shillings, turned it into pots, biscuit-fired them, and applied glaze.

"And when I opened the kiln and held them, they crushed in my hand like gravel."

He watched the cups that represented food for the table slip away like sawdust. "I was too much of a smart-arse. I hadn't tested my clay."

Decades on, and he believes that, finally, "of the people working with clay now, I have probably a fuller understanding of its capabilities... one of my aims has always been to allow the clay to have its say."

Castle doesn't give many interviews, but he comes prepared, with a handwritten copy of a favourite quote: "Castle's work is never abstract," said poet David Eggleton in 2002. "His pieces are metaphors they resonate with feelings and amalgamated memories."

The Titirangi foreshore becomes a double apertured winged form. Weathered greywacke rock is a bowl for a geologist and when Castle flips his new book around, the piece called inverted volcano is, he says, Rangitoto upside down, spewing red larva.

He shares a memory of that early studio potter, Olive Jones: "She showed me her kiln. There was only a peephole but I saw this intense heat, almost a yellow white..."

Castle knows clay and glazes, and the effects of oxygen and temperature. But, he says, the kiln gets the last word.

Semantically, he supposes, he should call himself a ceramicist. But he says, because he continues to make vessels, that makes him a potter. He won't engage on the art versus craft debate. "I've never bothered. I've simply worried about the lump of clay that's in front of me and got on with it."

Potting today, he says, is "technically very well advanced".

"There are people there who are capable of producing work of a high standard and an interesting aesthetic for the table and general household use. But when people start having ideas and using clay to express those ideas I've seen very little that touches me."

Castle considers himself "mid-career". Raise an eyebrow, and he bats back: "Some people have said I'm a late bloomer..."

Potters, he says, must work very hard.

"Since the age of 80, I've been able to get a reasonable hourly return. I recognise it's inefficient to be a one-man band, but I want to put a teaspoon of sweat into every pot, and guarantee that it is my sweat that has gone into it."