Thrown: British Columbia's Apprenctices of Bernard Leach and Their Contemporaries

Thrown brings together essays by curators, first hand accounts by potters, archival documents, photographs and letters from the personal collections of seven highly respected potters who began to thrown pots in the Vancouver Western area during the 1960s.
Thrown is inspired by the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery’s ground breaking exhibition, Thrown: Influences and Intentions of West Coast Potters. Selected by Matthew Higgs as one of the “Top 10 shows of 2004” (Artforum International) for its unconventional and compelling approach to the studio pottery movement, the exhibition featured over 600 pots by John Reeve, Glenn Lewis, Michael Henry and Ian Steele—the four Canadian apprentices of English potter Bernard Leach—and their like-minded contemporaries Tam Irving, Charmian Johnson and Wayne Ngan. Fresh from their studies at the Vancouver College of Art, each of the four traveled to St. Ives in Cornwall, England and completed a two-year apprenticeship: Reeve, 1958- 1961; Lewis 1961–1963, Henry 1963–1965; and Steele 1963–1965. When they returned to Vancouver, they found themselves in the experimental 1960s Vancouver art scene.
This is their story, as well as the story of an art material and a movement.