Janet Leach was born to a Methodist family in Grand Saline, Texas, USA. She was the first foreign artist to study pottery in Japan, doing so for two years under Shoji Hamada. While in Japan she developed a close relationship with renowned British potter Bernard Leach, and the two married in 1956. On their return to Cornwall in the same year, Janet became responsible for the management of Leach Pottery; however, her own work was markedly different from the house-style, heavily influenced by Japanese techniques as well as by American and European abstraction.
American ceramicist and potter Janet Leach (née Darnell) was born to a Methodist family in Grand Saline, Texas, USA on 15 March 1918. In the early 1930s she moved to New York City, and in 1938 briefly worked as an assistant to sculptor Robert Cronbach before enrolling in the Depression-era Federal Works Art Project. She began to study and practice pottery only in her early thirties. While living in upstate New York she apprenticed at the women-owned Inwood Pottery and taught at Rockland State Hospital, a mental health facility. She subsequently studied ceramics at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where she met her two greatest mentors: Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada. (Black Mountain became a refugee for a number of important German emigre artists following the rise of Nazism, including Bauhauslers Anni and Josef Albers.) She became fascinated with Hamada’s throwing and coiling techniques and his physical bodily involvement with clay; inspired by his lack of dependency on the wheel, she asked to apprentice with him in Japan. Hamada agreed, and in 1954 she became the first foreign woman to study traditional pottery methods in Japan. She stayed with a traditional pottery family in the remote village of Tamba, in the central mountains, and her love of the purity, simplicity and unaffected nature of their works was to remain a distinctive character of her own production.
While in Japan, she developed a close relationship with English potter Bernard Leach, who along with Hamada had founded Leach Pottery in St Ives in 1920. The two married in 1956. They intended to remain in Japan, but shortly before their marriage Bernard’s eldest son David announced that he would be leaving Leach Pottery to establish his own studio. In 1956 the couple were forced to return to England to maintain the business. In St Ives, Janet Leach became responsible for the management of the Pottery. Although Bernard initially hoped that his wife would be inspired by his work, she was resolute in following her own ideas, and he acknowledged that her pots showed no direct influence from him. Nevertheless, while she embraced the Japanese combination of spontaneity and form, her work still retained traces of her sculptural training. Her preference for wood firing gave many pieces an expressive quality that revealed the influence of Japanese traditions, but also an appreciation of modern American and European abstraction. Leach ‘was one of the first potters to respond more directly and convincingly to the aesthetic of Japanese kilns, long before it became so in-vogue’ (Whiting, Oxford Ceramics Gallery). An important technical achievement while at the Leacch Pottery was her development of a black stoneware body based on a local deposit, mixed with their standard red body and to which was added ground chrome ore and manganese dioxide, and which would characterise a series of elegant bottles in the 1980s (Walters 2007, p. 104).
In 1959 Leach held her first exhibition, jointly with William Marshall, at the Primavera Gallery in London, founded by German Jewish émigré, Henry Rothschild. The Times noted that ‘If in her handling of form and texture she shows a sculptor’s temperament, it his her ‘tachiste’ method of decoration which is of particular interest. She relies on dipped, poured and splashed glazes to give pattern and contrasting tones […] a technique which demands skill as well as a certain abandonment of control to the accidental’ (The Times 1959, p. 8). She showed with with Bernard and Austrian refugee, Lucie Rie, at Primavera in 1968, at the Molton Gallery founded by refugee Annely Juda, and at Marjorie Parr Gallery. In 1980 she participated in the survey exhibition British Pottery at the Arts Centre, organised jointly with the British Council. Leach was a member of the Cornwall Crafts Association, founded in Truro in 1973, and the Penwith Society of Arts, whose members included Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth (of whom Leach was a close friend). After Bernard died in 1979 Leach withdrew from managing the studio and focused on her own works. Despite the gradual deterioration of her health and the shock of the theft, in 1995, of her husband’s pots from the showroom next to her house (the majority were recovered), she continued to make pots of great distinction by hand, no longer able to operate her wheel.
Janet Leach died in St Ives, Cornwall, England on 12 September 1997. in 2007 Tate St Ives held a large retrospective, which revealed her versatility and her experimentation with different glazes and clays. Among the exhibits was a bottle from 1960 featuring a geometric surface decoration of semi-opaque cream glaze over a red body, in which ‘the layering of the glaze defines a pattern […] as controlled and refined as any relief by Ben Nicholson or Naum Gabo’ (Walters 2007, p. 103). Leach's work is held in UK public collections including Tate and V&A.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Janet Leach]
Publications related to [Janet Leach] in the Ben Uri Library