Robert Briscoe
What can you learn from a pot? How to sip tea, eat noodles, arrange flowers and set a table. Where the potter pressed a thumb or used a tool to make a groove. That clay can be both soft and hard. What hospitality means. Why craft matters.
Twenty years ago, friends gave us a celadon platter by Warren MacKenzie as a wedding gift. I knew nothing about pots and less about MacKenzie, but over the next several months his platter taught me the difference between handmade and store-bought. The following fall I walked into an art fair booth and came out with a bowl by Robert Briscoe. That day I became a collector, someone with a passion for pots.
It’s no surprise I was drawn to Briscoe’s pots after living with MacKenzie’s. The two friends share a philosophy and aesthetic: functionality, simplicity, honesty, affordability. Their pots are meant to be used everyday, filled with food or drink or flowers, passed around the table, warmed in the oven, washed in the dishwasher.
“When people put food in one of your pots, you’re a member of that family,” Briscoe says. “You are part of the ritual of breaking bread together. I want my pots to engage people where they live and to play a part in their savoring of life.”
He has made pots regularly since 1967, full time since 1978. His studio and kilns are at his home in Harris, Minnesota, on 31 acres of woods and fields. A second building behind the main house serves as guest quarters and a showroom that works on the honor system: Go inside, choose a pot, leave a check.
Once a year, on Mother’s Day weekend, his yard is full of tents and tables and pots made by Briscoe and invited guests. Seventeen years ago, Briscoe and other potters who live along Minnesota Highway 95 (northeast of the state’s capital of St. Paul and near the Wisconsin border) held their first studio tour and sale. Last year the tour, now a destination event for collectors nationwide, drew more than 2,200 people from 28 states.
Briscoe wasn’t supposed to become a potter. He was supposed to wear a white collar, not work with his hands. Instead, he found he could be a carpenter, bricklayer, engineer, physicist and artist, all through ceramics. His parents, who married young during the Depression, taught him the value of generosity, the reason many of his pots are large in scale. His tea bowls and noodle bowls take two hands.
He works almost entirely on the wheel, mixing his own clay, slips and glazes. Each night before he goes to sleep he imagines the first pot he’ll make the next day and visualizes the steps. “Then, when I get to the wheel in the morning after coffee, I don’t have that ‘What am I going to do?’ moment. I make that pot.”
He throws quickly on a fast-turning wheel with fairly soft clay. Even after firing, his pots have movement and organic potential. He applies multiple layers of slip and glaze to bisqueware, then does the final firing. “I have to make instant decisions and get out of my own way. It’s a forced spontaneity.” He fires by sight, judging the atmosphere in the kiln based on the color of the flame.
Perfection is never his goal. “You make a pot and it has a certain lean to it. I might add texture to emphasize that, or add texture somewhere else to de-emphasize it.” Often he attaches tiny handles that aren’t really handles. “I used to call them squirrel ears. Their only function is to move the eye. How I want to weight the pot—toward the base or the top—is how I choose where to place the handles. They articulate the form.” They also add expression and attitude.
Briscoe’s forms are sometimes round and soft, sometimes vertical and hard-edged. Surfaces are deep and complex, with spots, textures, rivulets and crackles. Thin lines, swirls, drips and subtle colors define spaces. Bases are weighty, rims substantial. Asymmetry adds vitality and surprise. The overall feel is earthy, companionable, robust.
I’m looking at the Briscoe bowl I bought 20 years ago. The rim curves inward. Small non-handles define the stance. The inside is green with dark speckles, the outside brown with drips and runs. Simple and practical, it’s a quiet pot that remains deeply pleasing.
“There was a time when a big argument was going on,” Briscoe recalls. “Is craft art? Is pottery art? People were dropping out of functional pots to become glassblowers, raku artists, sculptors. I thought then, and still feel, I have no desire to go anywhere else.”
—Pamela Espeland writes about jazz, among other things. She is the author of several books and a collector of pots with her husband, John Whiting.
2100 Smallman St. Pittsburgh, PA 15222 | 412.261.7003 | www.contemporarycraft.org
Robert Briscoe
Vase with Handles, 2004
Stoneware
9” x 7” x 7”
Photo: Adam Kenney
