Sumptuous volume on Castle's pottery

Making the Molecules Dance - book cover. Photo / Supplied

Sitting at a cafe in Westmere, I think of what these streets would have been like about 70 years ago, when Len Castle first pressed his hands into the clay deposits on the beach below.

The light would have been the same, clear and white, reflecting up the slope from the middle reaches of the Waitemata, that sense of light and landscape that imbues his work.

My thought was sparked by the cafe's reading selection, an auction catalogue listing pages of Castle's pots, a testament to his prodigious output over the years and the continuing public interest in his work.

Few living New Zealand artists get a large hardback overview of their output. Even fewer get two, but the tome that collector Ron Sang published to acclaim in 2003 wasn't able to include the huge scope of the ceramicist's work.

Making the Molecules Dance, the title drawn from a lecture by Castle on feldspathic glazes, is a complement to Len Castle, Potter rather than an update, an exploration of the more alchemical aspects of Castle's practice.

The title was also used for Castle's 1994 retrospective at the Dowse Museum in Lower Hutt, curated by the late James Mack, which, as collector Simon Manchester points out in his contribution to the book, deliberately excluded Castle's domestic ware in favour of his more experimental work.

The starting point of the sumptuous new book is the motivational statement the late James Mack gave Castle when he was assembling a showcase of the best New Zealand craft for the 1991 World Expo in Seville, Spain: "The magma flows, the magma cools on its way to the ocean." The phrase stayed with Castle, encouraging him to re-evaluate his work and its exploration of natural forms.

The potter has taken photographs throughout his career, lugging his beaten-up Mamiya around the landscape seeking out interesting formations and textures. Landscapes, lichens and zones of geothermal activity were of particular interest.

By interspersing many of these photographs through the book, the links with the pottery forms and glazes are emphasised.

Photographs taken by his friends over the years fill out the record of Castle and his studios and kilns.

Castle's prose is quietly informative, with a sense that he has been able to distil the essence out of his experiences, such as his description of how in Bernard Leach's studio his "pulse quickened" when he first came across pictures of archaic Korean country bowls. Making the Molecules Dance is a sumptuous book which will give some explanation for the importance of pottery, and particularly Castle's pottery, in the country's cultural history.

* Adam Gifford is an Auckland reviewer. Making the Molecules Dance won the illustrative category of this year's Montana Book Awards.