Gallery 1 & 2

Adam Buick

… When you explore one of Adam’s pots, it can feel like a visit to this westernmost edge of Wales. I’m imagining Massive Intertidal Jar in the collection of Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales. This sits in the gallery on a block of Pembrokeshire bluestone. Its rich blue glaze is disrupted by splashes of Waun Llodi clay dug from the moor below Carn Treliwyd that overlooks Adam’s studio.

You can watch Adam at work creating this huge pot on the Amgueddfa Cymru YouTube channel, in what is far and away the Museum’s most popular online video. The appeal of this film lies partly in Adam’s relationship to his materials and his processes. The physicality, the rhythm, the repetition, the patience: all express an empathy with the clay and its temperament. He allows nature to have its unpredictable way – the chance effects of splattering gritty clay onto the pot’s surface, the pouring of the glaze, the glow and surge and crackle of flames from the burning wood.

Adam writes that ‘ultimately my work is about being present within a landscape.’ In the film he sits outdoors at the wheel in the sun and the breeze. His pots sit around him as part of the long-farmed landscape. The light comes and goes. In time, through repetitious, mindful, unflustered effort, a form emerges. In Adam’s words, his work is ‘about change, about natural cycles and the transience of human endeavour.’

Adam has said that a landscape has not only to be seen but also to be felt and even to be venerated. His physical presence in it can be marked by placing a jar in a specific location, by moving within the landscape along paths that are ‘like common routes of experience’, by collecting and incorporating the local materials he seeks out. But he is also seeking to give expression to something intangible about our experience of the landscape. …

Andrew Renton

(extract from the accompanying exhibition catalogue)