Geoffrey Whiting was born in Stocksfield, Northumberland. He trained to be an architect, but during a visit to India he settled in a village and worked with a family of local potters. Altogether he spent some six and half years in India assimilating the atmosphere and studying this craft. Whiting never received any professional training in the potters’ craft and since his initiation into the making of simple unglazed earthenware in that Indian village he returned to England and set up his own pottery – the Avoncraft Pottery– in Worcestershire. Here he produced pots in quantity for the domestic market, as well as single items for the collector, specialising in high temperature stoneware and porcelain. In 1972 he established a studio in Canterbury, where he also taught.

Whiting’s attitude to his craft was direct and uncluttered: ‘Of materials I try to keep very few. To have few, to know them really well and fully understand their capabilities brings breadth to one’s work. Too many extras tend to cloud issues and so have the opposite effect. Similarly with decoration. Although I have a variety of ways, I always feel happiest when I can exploit what the interaction of body, glaze and fore will produce naturally’. Of the production of single pieces he said ‘Moreover, it caters for too shallow a stratum of the community. Apart from this, repetition production, provided it is not carried to far, engenders a self-discipline in the workmanship and a humility towards clay which I doubt can be acquired in any other manner. It is also the only way of gaining real insight into form. No potter who has thrown a shape to the same superficial measurements, many hundreds of times, over a period of years, and has seen the shape change, either voluntarily or involuntarily, will fail to understand this’.

Whiting exhibited widely in his lifetime, and taught at art schools in Worcester and Chesterfield. Commissioned works included flower containers for Worcester Cathedral, and similar ecclesiastical ware elsewhere.

 

Glossary

  • Craft

    The creation of handmade objects intended to be both useful and decorative.

  • Earthenware

    One of the three major types of pottery, the others being stoneware and porcelain. It is opaque, soft and porous unless covered completely with glaze. The firing temperatures can be low - 800ºC or high - 1200ºC, when it starts to vitrify, becoming stoneware.

  • Glaze

    Vitreous coatings applied to pottery to make objects watertight and as a form of decoration. Also a glaze can be a thin, translucent or transparent coating applied to the surface of a painting to modify the colour tones. Glazes may also be applied on top of one another as a means of creating a sense of depth and translucency.

  • Porcelain

    One of the three major types of pottery, the others being stoneware and earthenware. Porcelain is fired in the region of 1300ºC to produce a white vitrified and translucent body.

  • Stoneware

    One of the three major types of pottery, the others being earthenware and porcelain. A buff, gray or brown clay is mixed with other clays and ceramic materials to make a heavy, opaque, highly plastic clay body that is fired at a high temperature - above 1200ºC. It is in between earthenware and porcelain in its character. The term stoneware also refers to the clay body and objects made from it.