Overview

Janet Darnell’s childhood in Texas during the Roaring Twenties and the Depression imbued her with resilience and practical skills, largely acquired on her grandparents’ farm. Aged 19 she took a bus to New York City where she found work as a sculptor’s assistant. During the Second World War she worked on Staten Island welding the hulls and bows of ten US Navy destroyers. After discovering pottery she met Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada at a Black Mountain College seminar where her love of pottery was sealed. She then spent two years potting in Japan where she met Bernard again and he proposed marriage. They planned to build a pottery near Kyoto but two years absence from the Leach Pottery obliged Bernard to return to Cornwall and a year later, in 1956, Janet reluctantly left Japan, persuaded to join him in St.Ives, a place unknown to her, in a country she had never visited. There she stayed for over 40 years, as manager of the world-famous Leach Pottery, while also making her own remarkable pots. 

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9781916846005

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Joanna Wason (née Griffiths) was born in 1952 in Berlin, where her father worked in Cold War intelligence. According to her mother ‘Stalin was being a bit of a nuisance’ so she took Joanna and her brothers back to Devon. In her early twenties Joanna moved with her young family to the far west of Cornwall where she had various jobs including making sculptures to commission. In 1988 Janet Leach employed her as her workshop assistant at the Leach Pottery in St.Ives. After Janet’s death in 1997 Joanna stayed at the Leach Pottery where she made her own individual pots for the next ten years. She still works part-time at the Leach gallery but now makes her pots in a workshop near St. Just.

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