The making of ceramics can possess a perverse alchemy. One must attend, with great care, to chemical balance, and to moisture, and to temperature, and after all this one still does not know for certain what will emerge. As the sculptor Aaron Angell notes, ‘You put it in the kiln, something happens in the dark, something comes out. Good or bad, it’s frustrating either way: if it’s bad, it’s annoying; if it’s good, it’s infuriating because it’s very hard to replicate.’

Angell contends with these matters – the matters of matter – with the enthusiastic diligence of the amateur scientist, visiting ancient kiln sites, or poring over long-out-of-print books, and to these matters he incorporates many others: a fascination with the beauty of everyday objects; a Marxist analysis of the problems of being an artist; and the legacies of empires, whether brittle, resilient or broken. And the works which emerge from all this, from the dark, are dense with form and history, at once prehistoric and apocalyptic and baroque.

The conversation took place at Troy Town, London, and was overseen with good-natured attention by Bashō, Angell’s dog, a Japanese Chin.

Jeremy Millar: What have you been making recently?

Aaron Angell: I’ve been making a sculpture in a glaze called Oni-hagi, which is a Japanese – originally Korean – regional glaze. I’ve been trying to reverse engineer it for probably four years – not constantly – although I got a real bee in my bonnet about a year ago and managed to get it working. I knew that it was mainly rice straw ash, which I have to import.

JM: Do you import the ash or the straw?

AA: The ash, because it needs to be burnt and prepared in a certain way. The straw is a by-product of the rice harvest, and then a by-product of that by-product is the ash. I suppose it could be useful as a fertiliser, but mainly it’s used by potters, and is quite a common ingredient in Japan, and there’s nowhere closer that I can get it from. I knew at least 50 percent of the glaze was made of this ash but beyond that I didn’t really have much information to work with.

I did think it would be really simple in its final formulation, and it is; I’m probably about 70 percent happy with it.

JM: And this is the thick white glaze here?

AA: Yeah. I’ve got some more of the material coming, so I’m going to be refining that over the coming months. I saw this glaze in Hagi, actually; I didn’t really know about it before. This was back in 2018, and I visited the current masters of that glaze, by accident, really. And then I got very, very interested in it, mostly because I knew it hadn’t been done outside of the East in its 800-year, maybe 1000-year, history (I think if it had been done, I would have found out, because I’ve been researching it for so long). There aren’t really any texts in English on how to produce it, and those that intimate the ways of doing it are all in Japanese, so it was a bit like reconstructing it from first principles.

I used it on three sculptures shown recently at Herald St gallery, and then there was one work in a hybrid technique that I call Shiga Oribe, but here used in a slightly different, Westernised way. It’s green, and there’s an orange colour underneath it, which is produced by fuming the pieces in the kiln on unwashed scallop shells and other seashells, and the salts from those shells colour the unglazed clay. So, you end up with this orange-and-green effect, which is not really possible by other means.

These two glazes are nice for sculpture because you can work very loosely with them. They’re really sensitive to different thicknesses when you’re pouring them or dipping them; you just have to get it on, really. You play with it and you end up with this glaze which is as gestural in its application as the construction of the piece underneath itself. Actually, probably even more gestural because there’s a lot of fakery with the pieces – they’re not as slammed together as they look. They’re almost completely hollow inside. You have to hollow pieces out and then place them, making it look like you’ve been working with these heavy lumps. Not that they’re not heavy, there is some thickness to them, but there is this slight trickery, otherwise the pieces would explode in the kiln.

JM: Has your work changed?

AA: I think my work has been getting increasingly biomorphic and abstract, I suppose, over the years. I don’t have a desire to push that abstraction into anything much more minimalistic than this. It’s about maintaining the density. The work shown at Herald St was on the edge of abstraction, but had some, if not quite figuration, then some more object-defined elements.

JM: There are clearly defined shapes in the works, aren’t there? Coiled shapes and things which are almost recognisable, although you’re not quite sure what you might recognise them as.

AA: Yeah, that’s an area that I like to work in, and I don’t like to push clay in directions which are too readable or too figurative or too descriptive. I think clay is quite a limited material, and it’s not in the nature of the material to make it do things which are too trompe-l’oeil or something.

It’s an old phrase, but stuff can get crafted to death. The most vital aspect of clay, I think, is the textures you get from raw clay and when I work with it, I try to maintain the spirit of that rawness throughout what is quite a long-winded, and very interfering, process. So as much as possible I try not to touch things.

It’s why I like firing with wood. I don’t do it very often because it’s expensive, but that’s where you would use no glaze at all. You’re able to preserve this skeleton, this sketch, but if you fired them in the gas kiln it would just be really bland.

JM: I just want to go back to the beginning, when you first started working with clay. You were just about to graduate from the Slade, and you saw some of Lucio Fontana’s ceramic works. What was that encounter like? What did that make possible?

AA: I’d seen some works in clay that were closer to his more well-known work – eggs split open, things like that – before, but I wasn’t particularly interested in them. It was the work that he produced at Sèvres that I found interesting; they just seemed to let him run riot.

JM: This was in 1937, and he said: ‘The royal glazes bored me; I brought to the workshops that had served the tables of every King Louis of France a minotaur on a leash that butted the porcelain baskets and the biscuit allegories.’

AA: What does he even mean by that?

JM: I’m not sure. That he was like a half-bull in a china factory?

AA: The glazes at Sèvres are quite bright and it occurred to me that if you had an environment like that, which was quite limited in terms of what was available, then clay was quite an easy material to work with. I was starting to make more sculpture, and I was also questioning what you make a sculpture out of. In a really basic sense, it always seems to mean something at a material level.

Phyllida Barlow was someone that I spoke with a lot at the Slade, and she used to do these quick-build workshops where she’d just get stuff out of the skip and show you how to make big sculpture quickly with chicken wire and plaster, or whatever. I remember thinking, but that means something, that a material might mean Phyllida, or it might mean Franz West. Even this scrappiness was really loaded. I mean, it sounds really dumb, but what do you make a sculpture out of?

Traditionally it would have been stone or bronze, especially at the Slade, but that was prohibitively expensive, and it also relies on a totally different outlook. And most of those sculptures would have started as clay anyway, to make a ceramic shell mould, or to model something. That was how clay was used there, and so I liked seeing Fontana’s directness, and his use of the facility – his disruption of the facility – at Sèvres, for completely other ends. No one around me was doing anything like it. There had been lots of people working with ceramics in an interesting sculptural way earlier, but schools got rid of their ceramics departments, sold all the equipment, and a lot of this knowledge was lost. The people that I had supporting me were people like Alison Britton and Richard Slee, RCA graduates from the 1970s and ’80s, and so there was this really big generational gap, and a gap in terms of figuring out how a lot of things were done.

The pathway to learning in an industrial throwing environment in this country and then moving on to studio pottery is now absent, and so the practice has gone back to how people worked before, as a sole trader, doing everything yourself, with maybe an assistant or apprentice. That’s a model that was originally borrowed from Japan in the 1920s, but also relates to other guild-related professions in the West and how these would work. I like doing this thing that’s like country pottery but in London, in the middle of Hoxton, which is a different type of village.

JM: You play with that as well, don’t you? What’s the phrase on your tote bag? Quaint Old English Pottery?

AA: Oh yeah, that was the title of a book [by Charles J. Lomax]; I don’t actually have a copy because it’s quite expensive. I quite liked that; it’s a very funny thing to call a book. It’s was a book that Shōji Hamada was very interested in. I think he took it back to Mashiko and it became part of this cultural exchange between England – Cornwall in particular – and Japan that happened in the 1920s through to, well, through to now, but the heyday was from the 1920s to the ’70s. It’s a really interesting example of something working in both directions. Hamada has this huge collection of sixteenth- to eighteenth-century English furniture that he bought cheaply in the UK and took to Japan, and Bernard Leach and others brought stuff from Japan back here. We’re extremely aware now of forms of cultural appropriation and this was a rare example of a mutually beneficial relationship between two ‘traditional’ cultures – represented here by members of the bourgeoisie – where neither was the subject nor the object. They were also, of course, two imperial powers.

JM: Perhaps both parties saw themselves as representatives of the superior cultural power – terrible imperialists, both – and so felt somewhat comfortable in the exchange.

AA: The Japanese considered themselves superior, especially within the world of craft and its appreciation. Just a couple of days ago I saw on Instagram a Korean sake bottle, Joseon era, fifteenth or sixteenth century, which sold at Sotheby’s for over 6,00,000 Hong Kong dollars [£570,000] and in their promotional material and in the listing it’s described as a Tokkuri, a Japanese term for a flask for alcohol. The glaze is described as ‘kohiki’, which is the slip put over the top, and which has its own history in Japan, but it’s not kohiki, it’s buncheong, a Korean technique, which is how it should be described. There are a lot of comments below the Sotheby’s Instagram post, mainly from Koreans, pointing this out, so there’s still a lot of tension around these objects. The imperialism persists in the language of connoisseurship.

JM: This tradition between England and Japan is something that you could be seen to be working within, but also working against in some ways. What is it that you find so interesting?

AA: I think Britain and Japan have a weirdly similar geology, so just on a practical level, it makes sense that you replicate some of the techniques over here. But the differences are interesting, too. [Flicks through book of ancient Japanese ceramics.] Look at something like these flower vases from the 1500s; this one, for example, is made to look like it’s been trodden on. Everything about this is deliberate. To be working with this level of ironic rustication in the 1500s is amazing. And it’s so different to any history of appreciation we had here. It’s not been made by an incompetent peasant potter; it’s just been made to look like it has.

Some of the bowls that are most expensive now were made by these skilled peasant potters, and most of their work would look terrible because they’ve just made 3,000 of them in the worst conditions you could imagine. But out of that would come one that’s just so. It’s to do with Buddhism as well. The work is so no-mind that it’s perfect.

If you read early reports from the first Jesuits to reach Japan, they describe encounters with some of these more rustic Momoyama-era tea ceramics. They would describe meeting someone who appreciated these works, who paid so much for a particular bowl ‘which looked like something we wouldn’t even fill with water and put in a birdcage’, and it was so puzzling to them. They already knew and were interested in Chinese porcelain, but this more direct work they couldn’t understand at all.

JM: They had a completely separate aesthetic development and appreciation, based on distinct belief systems and philosophies.

AA: That’s where my interest really comes from, this idea of discrete and conspicuous rustication, and how that can be interpreted within sculpture without using now almost fully Westernised terms, like wabi-sabi. When I first started learning about ceramics, the ones I liked the most were Japanese, or if they weren’t Japanese they were American and very much trying to be Japanese.

JM: I know you’re interested in things being out of place or out of time, and is this related? The thing about ceramics is that it’s both very fragile and also incredibly durable.

AA: Yeah, it lasts forever. You have to be careful what you put in the kiln, because after it’s fired, you can’t really do anything with it if you don’t like it. Firing a kiln is a geological process because you’re realigning quartz particles, turning clay into a pseudo-stone. There’s not much you can do that hasn’t been done before, and so in reconstructing these older glazes you’re trying to find small differences in working with them. That’s what I’m trying to do with these mediaeval European glazes through to the Japanese glazes – Oni-hagi, Oribe, Shigaraki, Iga – using these processes purely sculpturally, which hasn’t really been much done, thinking of the works as sculpture first.

JM: You used the phrase with me before, discussing the ‘embedded knowledge of the facility’. Is this what happens in the studio?

AA: I’ve had no ceramics training, and so I’ve made every mistake. The things I’m interested in have been pretty stable, so I’ve just been catching up, learning about materials, and the professionalism of the studio. We run a residency programme for artists here as well – we don’t really work with other ceramicists – and that presents interesting challenges, managing their expectations, managing disappointment. All ceramics is managing disappointment.

JM: All life is.

AA: Yeah, all life is.

JM: Looking at a work like this [Ancient Croydon (2025)] with its coils, and its spurs, and its accretions, how do you start? Do you make sketches? Do you have a sense of how it will appear or does it just emerge from working with the materials?

AA: I tend to make sketches when I’m making a bunch of them at once and I want to instil some sense of variation in the process.

JM: So they don’t all become the same thing?

AA: Yeah, sometimes working with sketches to remember what glaze I wanted to use, but they really just find their own form. I work with a blowtorch so I can work a lot quicker with the clay, firing with one hand, modelling with the other.

I try to make it as instinctive, as sketch-like, as possible. There’s only so much you can do like that with the material, but working with some of these cutting-away techniques is quite useful. I’ve learned how to make work that’s bigger and more solid without it exploding – forced drying, slow firing. But yeah, I could just as easily start making one as I could make a sketch for one. I don’t have a set process. Sometimes there’s work on paper – watercolours, which I have a lot of but have never shown.

JM: Do the sculptures tend towards a particular form?

AA: Yeah, they end up being landscape shape, but a lot of this is to do with the size of my kiln shelves as well. You can have choice paralysis with a material that’s so formless, so finding ways to force certain decisions is really useful, and can then allow certain decisions in the moment. Then the works will suddenly get to a point where you can’t change anything about them.

I mean, I made these pieces at the same time. I’m sure parts of one ended up on the other; there’s a point – a very limited period – where they almost breed with each other, maybe a day, and then bits are too dry, or like you can do too much damage removing something. I work in series; it would be very weird for me to be making just one sculpture because I tend to make them for shows where there’s more than one of them.

I like to work with stuff that I can manage on my own in the studio or with one assistant. Most of these would have involved one other person to help load them because they’d weigh 30 kg or so before the first firing.

JM: Agnes Martin’s paintings were always six foot square, and when she got older and couldn’t carry a six foot painting, they became five foot square. There’s something quite liberating about such restrictions, and that works have to be a certain size because of circumstance. That said, is there anything that you’d really like to do but don’t yet feel able?

AA: I’ve got 2,000 bricks that came from Richard Batterham’s kiln after he passed away, and I’ve been meaning to build a countryside kiln with those that’s really just for me. I want to get the effects of Iga ware firing, but in a more convenient way than a traditional Iga kiln. Fast and dirty, almost like a kerosene-powered train kiln, but I need somebody to design it for me, because I can’t.

That’s what I want to do, and to have a second location. I can’t fire with wood in the city, because there’s too much smoke. But yeah, my Iga firebox kiln is what I want to do. I should probably just do it.