Outside Tradition: Glenys Barton and Jacqueline Poncelet

This article was published in the May/June 1973 issue of Crafts magazine.
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A visit to the workshop of Jacqueline Poncelet and Glenys Barton is a surprising experience. The workshop is under one of the bleak railway arches of St Pancras. Twin electric kilns sit side by side at shoulder height. A chic black cloche hat sits incongruously on a shelf - the only “ feminine” touch in the place. “We hardly knew each other at the Royal College,” says Jacqui. “Glenys was one year ahead of me. I suppose the fact that we share a workshop is something that happened quite by chance.” But Glenys counteracts this with: “Not really. You were one of the people I had decided it would be possible to share a studio with. It seems to me that it is very important to like someone else’s work if you are going to share a workshop with them . . . at least I certainly admire Jacqui’s work - I can’t really speak for Jacqui’s feelings about mine.”

It is obvious that they do have a great respect for each other’s work and the fact that what they do is so totally different but is, in each case, the result of the use of the same fundamental techniques, make this mutual understanding and regard all the more possible. Both teach at Camberwell and Portsmouth colleges of art so that their working association extends beyond the limits of their workshop.

Glenys Barton was born in Stoke-on-Trent and grew up in the atmosphere of the ceramic industry (her aunt is a hand-painter decorator in a factory). She recalls that her first intention was to get as far away as possible from the whole atmosphere of mass-production and the industrial world and into what she then believed to be a more desirable ambience. Curiously enough, she has bypassed the seductions of the studio-potter’s world, discovered that for her the real interest lies not so much in the making as in conceiving the ideas for things to come, at last, to recognise that the correct metier for her depends on those very mass-production techniques she wished so passionately to resist. “ I spent a whole year at the Royal College exploring the possibilities of industrial techniques,” she says. “Everything I do now is based on industrial techniques and ways of decorating.”

Her objects, pyramids and cubes, are characterised by their precision. After being biscuit-fired they are ground on a lap-wheel, a process that can take days. There is little place here for things being left to chance, for a spontaneous eruption. What is lacking in obvious emotional appeal is certainly counteracted by a professionalism that commands one’s respect. It is not in the least surprising to learn that Glenys manages to organise a source of china clay from Stoke. She is very much a person of her time, tough, sensitive, highly intelligent, a little alarming and very impressive. “1 don’t really think I am a craftsman. Making things really bores me. I’m much more excited by the process of conceiving the idea. I ’d actually like to be able to leave the making of things to someone else. Does that sound terrible?”

While she was still at the Royal College, Glenys Barton won a Design Award for a range of stacking china now retailing through the Conran chain of Habitat shops. “ I still think that the cup I designed for that range is the most beautiful object I have designed yet,” she says. Certainly the china is extremely successful and she is working on a range of stacking cooking pots for the same organisation. She is also working on a vast mural for the new London Hilton: 500 square feet of tiles will greet people whirling round the Shepherds Bush roundabout. She will supervise; others will execute. The mural is mathematical, sober, subdued in colour, extremely urban and sophisticated. Glenys says that she hates the feeling that she can’t control her environment. Yet visiting her flat one feels that she is completely in control. A marvellous simplicity and economy of objects characterises her style of living. No one who likes clutter would be happy here. Colours are clear. Objects are unfussy. The problem is that it is very far from her workshop. Moving between St Pancras, Camberwell, Portsmouth and her home in south London, teaching, travelling and creating - there is great strain implicit in such a lifestyle.

The pyramids she makes she sells at a loss at £25. Where, one wonders, do we place such objects? Art galleries? “You just have to say ‘ceramics’ and they don’t want to know,” says Glenys. And yet such objects can hardly be called “pots” . One thinks o f those factories in the Scandinavian countries where studio craftsmen are employed as designers. Recognition for Glenys has in fact come from Denmark where she will be having a one-man show from 17 March in Copenhagen’s equivalent of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

She works very carefully, drawing a great deal, working everything out on paper at first, constructing paper or cardboard models, measuring everything meticulously. Her decorating is done with commercial transfers which she designs. It all seems a far cry from one’s idea of the traditional English studio potter and indeed Glenys Barton claims she is moving further and further away from that tradition. In this she and Jacqueline Poncelet are alike. The material they use is exactly the same material used in industry. They like to think of their work as being essentially English and feel their influences to be those that arise from an association with Stoke on Trent rather than ancient Japan or China. They owe nothing to Bernard Leach and that particular English tradition.

Jacqueline Poncelet is as much a child of her time as Glenys Barton and yet another type of child entirely. In her flat, dressed in a cashmere sweater and pink skirt covered in Tom and Jerry figures, she is seen in what Glenys considers her “controlled” environment. Here she lives surrounded by surprising objects; plastic Disney characters, pieces of Thirties pottery, bird-infested ceramic planters, cottage objects of a particular, quaint variety. She has little to say about her work. Let it speak for itself. At most one is met with an enigmatic smile or a certain gentle acquiescence. On the wall there is a half completed mural of very exquisitely drawn spring flowers and butterflies. “No, I don’t draw very much,” she says.

Her first pieces were stoneware and she found that she was doing more and more carving of these. She turned to bone-china quite naturally as a much more responsive vehicle for this type o f technique. “ I have always used industrial techniques,” she says, “even at Wolverhampton.”

And who can she think of who has influenced her more than anyone else ? The answer is a while in coming: “The mould-maker at Wolverhampton”. “A superb technician,” says Glenys. “A nice man . . . a real Stoke character,” says Jacqui. And then they both giggle at the thought o f how he would react if he knew what a vast influence he had exercised on both of them.

Casting all her pieces to begin with, Jacqui then proceeds to carve their surfaces. Sometimes she works for as long as two days simply whittling away the surface of a particular piece. “The problem is this very fine white dust,” she says. “At one time I even tried working in a mask.”

In the workshop in St Pancras, dirt is the great enemy. They wage a constant battle against the insidious London grime and it seems that they are winning. Everything is white; the medium they work in, the walls, the woodwork and even their hands. The atmosphere that characterises both of them is serious, intense and dedicated. Both are under thirty and yet one is left with a feeling that they have gone a long way already. When asked whose work she has been most influenced by, Jacqueline says after a moment, “ I suppose it’s a dreadful thing to say, but . . . no one’s.” This is followed by a hand-over-the mouth, little-girl giggle of outrage. The mould-maker at Wolverhampton, that amazing anonymous man, can take a lot of credit.