Matt Blakely

Matthew Blakely interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 27th September 2017

00:05:11 Born in Windsor in 1963; my mother's mother lived until 1989 and was a big part of my childhood, but her husband died before I was born; my father's father also died before I was born but I met his mother and have a vague memory of her, but she died when I was three or four; my father's family were wealthy, almost upper-class, but they lost most of their money it the great financial crash of the 1920s; I'm not sure what my father's father did but he worked for the Foreign Office and ended up spending the last years of his life in Africa, possibly Kenya; I'm not sure whether his wife ever had a job; my mother's parents were from Redcar in Yorkshire and were working-class; my grandfather died early on in a work accident and it was my grandmother who looked after my mother, and she did lots of jobs; from my memories of her she worked in a toy store as a buyer, helping to run a department of a large shop in Twickenham, London, where they had moved to from Redcar, and where my mother grew up; I'm not sure where my grandfather was working when he died; I think he had worked in the docks. but he moved around as at that time there was very little work; I think he had only been working at the place where he was killed for a few days, but was buried under a truck-load of coal; my father was about thirteen years older than my mother; he came back from the war though was really too young to fight; he was in India training, but the war ended before he saw any action, but he stayed on in the army for a few years; he must have done his degree before going to India; when he came back he did his PhD in physical chemistry and worked for ICI; my mother left school when she was fifteen and trained to be a shorthand typist; she then worked for Pinewood Studios and various places as a secretary; my parents met and married, and my father ended up leaving ICI and went into education; he became a lecturer in physical chemistry at the City University; my mother gave up work to have me and my sister, and she took 'O' levels that she hadn't had a chance to do when she was younger; she then became a primary school teacher

05:36:17 My father's interest in physical chemistry possibly did influence me as a potter, but it seemed to me to be incredibly dry when I was growing up; he had some massive books on water and I'd think how could there be an entire book about that; later on in life, probably within the last twenty years while he was alive, we actually did have quite a few discussions about quantum mechanics and the physics of astronomy, which he was quite interested in as am I; why I ended up doing sciences was more to do with being good at it and found it quite easy

06:45:00 On first memories, I do remember hiding under a willow tree when I was about six or seven; I described the tree and the place and my mother clarified and confirmed my memory; I was hiding under the tree waiting to be told off as I had just hit my sister over the head with a trowel; it was quite traumatic, for her too, and that's why it sticks in my mind; my first school was Christ Church in Surbiton, Surrey, though our first house was in Leatherhead; it was just before primary school that we moved to Surbiton; to begin with there was no place for me in the school so I was sent to a woman called Mrs Pash, a fearsome old lady who had private classes; I think there were about ten children there; I still have the weird-shaped sock for putting Christmas presents in which I sewed and embroidered my name on; she taught us to read and write so that when I went to school I could already read; I think I must have been six when I went to school; the primary school was in walking distance of where I lived and I was there for seven years; I remember quite a lot about it; it was fine as far as schools go; I was a bit naughty and I think it started because in the first year I could already read and write and we had quite a strict teacher; she was teaching things I could already do so she put me over at one side of the classroom and I had time on my hands; it made me think that school was just easy and I didn't have to do anything; however I did have some really good teachers; my teacher in the year before I left was really good, he was quite creative and into art - painting, drawing, illustrating - and I was as well; we did do clay modelling but I don't think we fired anything and it was only a minor part; looking back on it, every thing I got for Christmas were to do with art - painting by numbers, black boards you could scratch through revealing silver - a form of engraving, lino cutting, oil paints - I was always drawing and painting; we used to go out into the countryside a lot because my parents didn't have much money and liked going away, so we used to go camping for a month in the summer and for lots of weekends throughout the year

11:34:02 I took 11+, passed, and went to Kingston Grammar; I can't say I enjoyed it really, but looking back on it my mother says it's a shame I didn't do this or that, but I don't regret anything as I wouldn't be where I am today if it hadn't been like that; I don't know where I could have gone if I hadn't gone there as having passed 11+ there were only two options, and I'm not sure if the other school would have been different; for the first three years we all did the same things; I think it was a rather pretentious school and thought it grander than it was; the teachers wore gowns, the head prefects wore gowns, and it was very into sport; we learnt Latin which no one else in the whole area did; then I did a lot of 'O' levels, but I must have decided not to do languages at that point; I still did history, English language and literature, those sorts of subjects; the choice was either classics - Greek and Latin - or science, and I did science; for 'A' level I did biology, chemistry, and a new 'A' level which was maths with physics; I passed them all; the teachers on the whole inspired me to be a belligerent young man; some of the teachers were fine; we had a chemistry teacher who I remember as a really nice man who made the subject interesting, so I quite enjoyed it, certainly for 'O' level; our biology teachers were OK; looking back, I didn't really enjoy school and I was quite rebellious; I went through a couple of stages, pre 'O' level and pre 'A' level where the teachers were telling my parents I was going to fail everything and was lucky to still be in the school; so I was obviously not doing much work at all but managed to swing round and put a lot of effort in and did OK; in one of those periods, I think when I'd just started 'A' levels, in the lunch breaks and after school I persuaded the art teacher to let me do art; then I did an art 'O' level but I had to get my parents to go to the school and get the headmaster to agree to me doing it, with the promise that it wouldn't impinge on any of the other subjects I was doing, and would do it all in my own time; the art teacher was really great and enthusiastic, and I liked her; she thought I had some ability, which was really nice; that was quite a contrast to how I was behaving with everything else I did; looking back on my rebellious nature at that time, I really didn't know what I wanted to do; I was good at certain things but I didn't have that much interest in them; I was good at maths, chemistry, and science in general, but I didn't really want to be a scientist, but it was more the school; I was rebelling against authority for the sake of authority, without there being a reason or basis for it; an example would be going into the sixth form when you are supposed to be treated like an adult, but then you have got other people in my year who have suddenly got gowns on, telling me what to do and giving me detention; they could swear at me, but if I swore at them I would get a detention; the only reason for that imbalance is because they are in the cricket eleven, for example; so it was rebelling against that really

17:28:22 On hobbies - I have tried to play the guitar throughout my life and I still can't really; I was drawing and painting a lot; I was a member of the Scouts and the Venture Scouts, which sounds a bit sad really, and again doesn't really go with the belligerent man, but I really loved that; it took me outside Surbiton, mountain climbing in Cumbria, caving, doing things I would never normally have done, giving me a different perspective on life; so I was away quite a lot doing things like that; I was terrible at sport; I don't really care about winning or not in a team game; I haven't got that competitive urge and am not really bothered; on religion - my father was very religious all the way through his life, but especially later on; he had a religious attitude which I can understand as it was very broad; he did believe in God and used to go to church and loved all of that, but he was very much an Anglican in believing that there were many paths to God, so he was very into Taoism and Buddhism and all sorts of other philosophies, so it was not a very exclusive, rigid belief; they did try to get me Confirmed and I did go to confirmation classes, but part of the way through the process my mother asked if I really wanted to go through with it as she could see I was not happy; she said that I didn't have to do it so I gave up; it wasn't until I went to university that I flirted with it; but I went to Sunday School every week, but it was something I had to do; on politics - my interest was rather vague when I was at school and my father came from a fairly upper middle class family, so they were really quite conformist; in saying that they were not Conservative voters; my father in the past had been a Marxist, and though he was not a Communist any more, he was relatively left wing, but in the seventies he was a little bit on the fence; certainly all the people around us were incredibly right wing; so mine was really more a reaction against that and I was very aware of what was going on throughout the seventies, the build-up to Thatcher, the Winter of Discontent; when that was happening I started getting more and more interested but I didn't really know any alternative apart from what was being presented in the media; the school, as you can imagine, was very conformist; they were quite happy to talk about historical revolutions but nothing else; I certainly was becoming interested but it was more as a reaction against something without knowing what I believed in that could possibly take its place

23:07:17 I had been told I would fail chemistry and the man who was our chemistry teacher was also the person who was our careers advisor; we all had to go and see him, and already in class he'd asked for a show of hands of people who were going to apply to Oxbridge; I put my hand up and he told me not to be so ridiculous; I went to see him and really had no idea what I wanted to do; the subject that I enjoyed the most was biology and I was quite interested in anatomy; everyone else was doing law or medicine, so I said medicine; he just lost it, telling me to grow up and not to be so ridiculous, that I wasn't going to pass let alone do well enough to do that; he just sent me out; I went home and told my parents; my mother asked me why was I thinking of medicine as I would never get into university for that, but apply for something I could get a place for; this decided me that I was going to do medicine; I did work hard and got an 'A' in chemistry; I went back to school and told the master afterwards, but he wouldn't talk to me; I went to Southampton University; looking back on it I'd say it was probably the most unhappy time of my life, I really didn't enjoy university very much; it had good points and I made some good friends; I was there for four years in the end and they were not totally miserable years, but it's something I'd never wish to live through again; I wouldn't look back on any part of my life and say that was a mistake to have done it because it inadvertently lead on to me finding what I did want to do, but I rarely look back on it at all; the subject itself I found OK in that I could do it; my concern was that I just got in with an 'A', 'B', and a 'C', and I needed three 'B's to get in; it was a relatively good medical school but I was worried that everybody would be much more intelligent and that I would really struggle; that was OK and I didn't have any real problem, it just became increasingly apparent that I'd really made a mistake in deciding to do that; there were things that I really enjoyed; I liked the anatomy, and some of the biochemistry was quite interesting, there were bits about it that I really quite liked; it was more the realization that I was going to be a doctor, and it was really following on from an authoritarian school where in medical school we have lectures where they are telling us how great we are going to be, and that, literally, we are going to be pillars of society; I sat looking around at everyone lapping it up thinking that I didn't want to be a pillar of society; so it was partly the increasing awareness that I had made a mistake but I didn't know what else I possibly could do or should have done instead; I started the third year and that was a particularly bad time because I had split up with a girlfriend and was living in a flat above an old peoples' home, and I felt I just couldn't do this any more; in the third year we spent a lot of time in hospitals and had lectures for part of the week; it was quite a progressive course and we were put out into work situations, and that is where it really hit home; I think the only way I could have continued was in a more abstracted version of medicine like becoming a pathologist, for example; as much as I liked the people I didn't enjoy being a trainee doctor; I quite liked the theoretical work but I just knew I didn't want to do it; I thought about various options; one was doing physiology and biochemistry, but then it was too much like science and most of the people who did it were bitter, failed medics; I started reading philosophy and psychology; I went to see the psychology department and they were quite keen to let me swap, and because we had done all the anatomy and neuroanatomy I had done enough elements to join in the second year; I had to do an extra module in that year and then just the final year to get my degree; I didn't actually enjoy that either; I didn't find what I wanted to; I was looking for some kind of answers really, to philosophical questions on how to live well, what it is to be human, what are ethics based on, and why do we follow particular paths when there isn't a rational explanation of why we would do that; I thought it was going to be much more along those paths, but it wasn't; it was very much modular based things where you just learnt about psychoanalysis, then ticked off that module, and pick another module, so it was quite piecemeal; I learnt some things and it wasn't bad, but it wasn't what I was looking for

31:00:01 I finished the degree and then I had really no idea what I was going to do at all; I went travelling for a while, I worked in Europe, then I came back; I had some friends in Leicester and my sister was there too so I got a job up there, had a series of pretty terrible jobs working in pubs and bars, and printing factories; I was there for about nine months, really not knowing at all what I wanted to do; I did try some evening classes, thinking of some possible options for a career but nothing really sprang to mind; at the end of that period I had saved some money and went to Europe, travelling again and ended up selling ice cream on beaches in France; that was great and I really enjoyed that; selling ice cream, having a bit of a holiday, we got arrested because the person organizing the sale didn't have a licence, so unbeknownst to us we were illegally selling ice cream; I came back to England and that weekend I went back to see my parents; my mother encouraged me to look through the Guardian for a job and there was one advertised at a Rudolph Steiner home for mentally handicapped adults; I applied, went for an interview, and got the job; that was live-in, and was fantastic; things really started to turn round then; the place was in Oxfordshire, north of Banbury in the countryside; I really enjoyed it and it was like nothing else I had ever done in my life; I met some really good people and had a great time, and the residents as well, I really enjoyed that type of work, care work; it sort of opened my eyes to people, the staff who worked there and also the residents; it was a shock to start with as you were plunged into the deep end, living there, but it really was life-changing; there were lots of things I liked about that work and I did that for quite a long time; I liked it because it was worthwhile; I really liked the people I was working with, staff and residents, and also it is outside the norm, so not a nine to five bank job where you are upholding an image, there is none of that at all, there is no image, you are right in the thick of human existence and often quite traumatic, sad, happy, everything, all the emotions, everything magnified, emotionally eye-opening, so I found something worthwhile there; I was at the Steiner place for nearly two years; one of the things that Southampton gave me was that a girlfriend at the time was doing a pottery evening class, so I started doing pottery evening classes there and got really into it, doing repeat classes for two years working with clay, and it really became a bit of an obsession at the time and absolutely loved it; when I went to the Steiner place I had got the job because I had a psychology degree and was more involved in life planning and things like that; all of the residents there had fairly full days, they worked in the garden, there were weaving workshops, all sorts of things and one of them was a pottery workshop; when the person who worked in the pottery left I begged to be allowed to work there, and ended up running it; that was fantastic; there were quite long shifts, but in the evenings I would be out in the pottery teaching myself to throw; that was doubly good, doing a job I really liked plus having access to all of that

37:25:09 I have often thought about what why I picked pottery; I was good at drawing and painting and maybe I could have done that; we did life-drawing and painting at art school when I went later on, which I really enjoyed, why did I pick pottery and not some other kind of art form; it is really difficult to give a complete answer; part of it is that it's tactile, you are physically manipulating something to create something; painting is maybe one step away from that, it is two-dimensional and you are distanced from it with a paintbrush; conceptual art you a completely distanced, it is an intellectual pursuit; so it is really hands-on, you are physically making the objects and manipulating it with your fingers; it is also a mixture of art and science because there is a lot of technique and science behind it, which you don't have to get involved in but if you really are to understand it you have to get to grips with because it really is chemistry there, you are actually transforming materials, blending them together, melting and fusing and turning them into different things, and the more of that you understand, the better, I think; there are all those sorts of points; I love the firing, the fact that you are making something but that is not the finished thing, you then have to submit it to the kiln and hope for the best; then it is transformed in that process; apart from that there is just something about it that I just can't put my finger on, but for me it just takes me over; even then it just took me over and I couldn't really explain entirely why; I can tell you all the things I like about it but I can't really tell you why it absolutely takes me over; it seems like it must be a perfect fit or something, something that I can't put into words; when I went to Australia I was collecting ash from the barbecues; once I had discovered that you could make wood ash into a glaze that absolutely fascinated me, so I was collecting all this ash and making different glazes out of it; I remember talking to people around me who just couldn't understand at all what I was doing, and when I explained it they understood what I was doing but not why, but I was mesmerized by it; so I can't give you a better answer than that

41:19:11 It is an obsession; since the Steiner school the longest I went without doing any was when I was travelling round Australia, and even that was in short bursts; after leaving the Steiner place I had saved enough money to go travelling so I went through south-east Asia and headed down to Australia; that took me four months; then I was in Sydney with very little money, so I was working at any job trying to get money to live on; even then I think that within a month or so, maybe two, of being in Sydney I had found out that there were pottery evening classes at Bondi Beach so I signed up for that, so I was having a great time being a back-packer, working long hours doing night shifts, but still finding spare time to go down to Bondi and making pots; I was sort of trying to learn to throw there as well, but that is where I was collecting all the wood ash from barbecues; I went on like that for a year and a half; I met Inge, my wife, in the back-packers hotel, 'Rucksack Rest', and we went travelling from Perth and Tasmania, ending up at Sydney again, and both of us working; we applied for residency in Australia and both of us got it; all that time we were working, and I was doing pottery at Bondi Pavilion and getting more and more taken over by it, going down in spare moments; the woman running would say she had a kids' class at the weekend and I would offer to go down and help, and in the end she suggested that I should think about doing a course; I hadn't really considered that because when I was at the Steiner place I wrote to the Crafts Council to try and find out about courses, and even whether there were any full-time potters still working, and I never got a reply; so I hadn't really heard about that until she told me that there were full-time courses; she had been to the National Art School in Sydney and she told me about it, and I became convinced that I just had to try and get there; I got my portfolio together and applied, and luckily I got in; that was a fantastic experience, I absolutely loved that; it was a three-year full-time course; I was very lucky; I had specifically chosen that course because it was very practical; there was a university course as well, but that was already very design based, and people were graduating without ever having fired a kiln; I really wanted to do everything, not just design things; at that time it was really practical, very full time, with thirty hours teaching a week, maybe more, really busy, and we did pure ceramics; so the only thing we did that wasn't pottery was life-drawing, which was great, and we did art history, and we did that with the rest of the college, and I enjoyed that as well, but all of the rest of the time was practical; you learnt to make your own kiln, how to make your own clays, glazes, all different making techniques; they had fantastic visiting lecturers coming in and demonstrating; there were wood kilns that you could come and fire at the weekends; it was just fantastic and I really enjoyed it; there were some inspiring teachers, one of whom I am still friends with, Sandy Lockwood; she was a teacher in the third year so I knew her work anyway; the pottery scene in Australia is a fairly small world, certainly in Sydney, and I loved her work and it was such a privilege being taught by her; but more of the teachers were really good; the guy that really got me into throwing was a Chilean called Diogenes Farri, and he was just fantastic; he was a fourth or fifth generation potter and he learnt to throw when he was very young, at six or seven; just watching him throw, the clay was like fluid through his hands, it was incredibly sensual, it was just a delight; so he really inspired me to use that as my making process; up until college nearly everything that I'd made had been hand built and different techniques, but from then I just loved the throwing process and how expressive it could be; throwing is on a wheel but hand built means using any other technique apart from a wheel

48:37:13 Teaching pottery is a hard thing that all art schools must face; how do you teach someone to be creative, that is pretty hard; one of the things I like about pottery that makes it rather difficult in the current teaching climate is that there is actually a lot of technique and technical skill behind the process; it's not something you can approach without having done any before and suddenly start making something that's good or expressive; you have got to have the technique; when I started that course, three years full-time, I thought I'd know everything there was to know about pottery, I'd be absolutely proficient at it, and there would be nothing else I'd need to learn; by the time I got to the end of it, it was really as though they'd opened a door and said there you go; teaching technique isn't that hard; obviously there is the science and that sort of component to it, but even in throwing there is a lot of technique that you have to learn first, so you are learning to centre the clay, which is getting it spinning around really nicely and smoothly, opening out, pulling up the walls, and then every different form, there are different techniques which you are going to need to know, to collar in form, how to widen it out, how to control it; essentially you need to know how to do that, teach yourself to do that so that you can do it without thinking about it; so throwing itself is quite a lovely, almost mystical process in a way; it is Zen, the best pots that I make, if I'm making boards and boards of pots, after an hour or so I almost suddenly come to and think that I haven't really been aware of what I am doing, and suddenly there is a row of pots which I've been make and putting up without really concentrating on it; some of them you still have to edit out, but even amongst a board of identical pots some of them are going to have a real particular character that just feel something special; essentially you have to have the technique so well learnt that you are doing it without thinking about it, it's second nature, you are not conscious about that; once you have thrown, say your cylinder, and got the wall thickness right, then you can start thinking about the shape and exactly how you are going to do it, the feel you are going to put into the pot, and expressing something in it; but you have to have the technique first; even now when I am teaching here, a lot of the work I am doing is teaching technique; I'm encouraging people to try things and talking about creativity, pushing them in certain directions, but that's not really something I can directly teach; it's almost like opening the door and saying go on then, that's up to you now; so a lot of it is technique, and certainly when I was teaching in colleges, really that's what I was teaching, the basics, how to throw, how to make in different techniques, glaze technology, kiln technology, things like that

52:29:01 Learning is a slow process; the first project we did was mugs, and we just threw mugs and mugs and mugs and mugs, and at the end of the week we chucked them all in the recycling; you learn not to be precious about your work; certainly by the time I had finished that project I could centre clay without thinking about it, and could do a lot of the process with a small amount of clay without thinking about it; so that increases with time; even now if I'm working on something that I don't normally do or if I've got new shapes, I'm having to think about it all the time; so the first one's I make aren't very good, you have to get into the feel of it, but there is a famous adage about it taking 30,000 hours for a craftsman to become a craftsman, a long time, and that is not specific to pottery but to other skill-based crafts as well

53:54:02 How do I know when something is good? Well, I suppose I don't really; if I am doing something new, not every idea that I have I can physically make or follow up on; some that I do I abandon because they just aren't as successful as they appear they are going to be, because it is a pathway really to the final object; it takes time but also a development; so often on that path I realize that maybe it's really not worth following up; apart from that it is a balance between self-belief and self-doubt isn't it; on the analogy with writing books, the difference for me is that I've got that part of the process where the work is actually taken out of my hands and put into a separate process that I am in control of but not entirely, but it's very much a transforming process that can either leave the work being a failure or bland or OK or fantastic, and so part of my process is editing that, selecting through, picking out the amazing work; that's what really makes is unique in a way; it's terribly challenging; when it's a failure it's just a disaster and very difficult to deal with, but when it is successful it is amazing; things that I do make like that I think I can't believe that I made it, it's almost like I didn't really make it; I'm basically learning enough about the sequence that goes into the production of that pot that I am doing everything I can on the way to encourage it, to make it become a success, and doing the firing, the place I put it in the kiln, everything about that, I'm trying to do everything I can to nudge it to that point, but whether it does it or not is not entirely up to me, there is a bit of luck there as well; that can be incredibly frustrating but it is fantastic as well; I really do like that; as far as whether work is aesthetically valued, some of that it just taking that work I really like and then putting it in an exhibition, or taking it to a show and seeing what the reaction is; when it is well-received that is fantastic, but there are certainly things that I've made that I really like and I still look at and think it fantastic, and no one else does