COLUMBIA Behind the Scenes at the Museum 2 Keith rice-Jones On a recent trip to England, we stayed with Jim and Liz Robison in Holmfirth (Jim was a presenter at last years Kelowna Clay Festival.) Jim took us to the York Art Gallery which had a small show 80 Pots Around the World, featuring work by British potters who had either moved to the UK from other countries or had travelled and been influenced by other cultures. The majority of the 80 pieces were from the Bill Ismay Collection which the gallery has recently taken on after Bill’s death in 2001. Currently the gallery is setting up a permanent exhibition space for their extensive pottery collections. The few pots in the show were just a teaser for the staggering collection stored across town in a secure anonymous museum facility where we were taken by Helen Walsh, the Museum’s Assistant Curator of Decorative Arts. Jim Robison had been one of those who encouraged Bill Ismay to put plans in place for a succession of the collection as he had no family. Jim was part of the team that went into the house to retrieve the collection after Bill’s death. Bill was anxious that the collection stay together, preferably in Yorkshire. The York Art Gallery were fortunate enough to be able to put it alongside their existing Milner-White collection of early studio pottery and. their extensive collection of medieval pots. Bill Ismay, who had been Wakefield Librarian, had cared for little else in his life except for collecting pots which he began in 1955. Though he lived alone, he wasn’t Neolithic pots in storage—just sitting out there on open shelves! a recluse and enjoyed having people to his small terraced house—one of his tricks being to hand you a pot to see if you recognised the maker. Pots on every conceivable surface made it almost impossible to move in the house. If you picked up one, you could reposition it in the dust—but Bill would be sure to follow and reset it, just so. At exhibitions, Bill would ask for a sheet of red stickers and later make payments when he could. He was the most welcome sight at anyone’s opening. Bill would travel around Britain and sometimes to Europe by train and sometimes even by Work by Hans Coper. The photo on the wall is of Ismay's own "display" of pots. bicycle. Bill admired both the Miner-White collection of early British studio pottery and all the medieval pots at the York Gallery. ‘There are 3,670 pots in the collection from over 500 potters, mostly British post-war from Bernard and the rest of the Leach dynasty, Hans Coper, Lucie Rie, Richard Batterham, Jim Malone, John Maltby, William Staite Murray, Shoji Hamada, Harry and May Davis, Geoffrey Whiting and many more, including makers from Japan, Africa, Australia, Netherlands Europe, South America, USA and Canada, represented by John Reeve and John Chalke and possibly others. The bias of the collection is functional but there are more sculptural pieces by people like Gordon Baldwin, Antonia Salmon and Jim Robison, In 1982, William Alfred Ismay was awarded a well-deserved Member of the British Empire (M.B.E.) for his services to studio pottery. His legacy is inspirational. Being in the first room at the storage facility felt a bit like being in Bill's house. Larger pots covered tables and shelves leaving only tight spaces between the metal cupboards which were dense with smaller works. Besides the large one on the side, there was a whole shelf of Hans Coper—this room was only the first part of the alphabet. Lucie Rie, Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada and all the others had their own shelf of pots in later rooms... I was able to handle a number of Ian Auld Continued on Page 5, Handling Pots Potters Guild of BC Newsletter - September 2009 4