Alexandra Lambley

Mingei and its Transnational Reception: The Translation and Appropriation of Mingei Theory and Practice by Bernard Leach’s four Vancouver Apprentices (1958-1979)

Left to right: Ian Steele, Warren MacKenzie, Michael Henry, Alix MacKenzie, Pat Ashmore, Jean Vinicombe, Shinsaku Hamada, Bernard Leach, Shoji Hamada, Bill Marshall, Scott Marshall, Janet Leach, Warren MacKenzie’s two daughters, John Reeve, Hannah R…

Left to right: Ian Steele, Warren MacKenzie, Michael Henry, Alix MacKenzie, Pat Ashmore, Jean Vinicombe, Shinsaku Hamada, Bernard Leach, Shoji Hamada, Bill Marshall, Scott Marshall, Janet Leach, Warren MacKenzie’s two daughters, John Reeve, Hannah Reeve (on shoulders), Soledad Reeve, Donna Balma, Glenn Lewis, Mirek Smisek, Jack Worseldine, Susan Marshall. Collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery Archives

In 1975 British studio potter Bernard Leach expressed his ‘hope of something in Canada’[1] . This thesis argues that this wish was manifest in the studio pottery movement in Vancouver in the 1960s and 1970s as his Anglo-East Asian craft theory and practice, and associated Mingei theory and practice, were appropriate tools through which his Canadian apprentices could explore their personal and Vancouver’s cultural hybridity and identity (Bhabha 1990). It considers the period from 1958, when John Reeve, the first of four apprentices from the Vancouver School of Art, arrived at the Leach Pottery, St. Ives, until 1979 when the Vancouver Art Gallery held its last exhibition of local studio pottery connected to the Leach and Mingei traditions. It focuses on the work of Reeve, Glenn Lewis who arrived at the Pottery in 1961, and Michael Henry and Ian Steele who arrived in 1963, examining their work through the lens of two conceptual tropes: translation and appropriation.

Cultural practice is born out of a ‘process of translating’ pre-identities (Hall and Maharaj 2001:36). Long-standing cultural connections that existed between Vancouver’s modernists and the rural artists’ colony of St. Ives brought the Leach Pottery to the apprentices’ attention and led them to initially translate their practice through Modernism. However, once in St. Ives they began to translate the development of their practice through Mingei craft theory and practice, demonstrated in the work of Shōji Hamada and Janet Leach, as it was ‘[m]oulded by Buddhist aesthetics’ (Kikuchi 2004:xv), therefore related directly to the more contemporary postwar American avant-garde. Appropriation occurs when artists ‘adopt imagery, concepts and ways of making art that other artists have used at other times to adapt these artistic means to their own interests’ (Verwoert 2007:1). Drawing on oral history interviews, the thesis examines the apprentices’ differing appropriations of the Leach and Mingei traditions on their return to Vancouver, comparing their work to that of their contemporaries. It reveals that their individual appropriations were autobiographical and helped to shape Vancouver’s cultural and place identity in the 1960s and 1970s, specifically through the apprentices’ contributions to the back-to-the-land movement and early Vancouver postmodernism. It argues that political, economic, environmental, social and cultural conditions specific to Vancouver enabled Leach’s ‘hope’ to materialise.

[1] Leach 1975: An Interview with Marty Gross. London: British Library