David Constantine White
Brier Hey Pottery exists today because of the legacy of celebrated ceramicist David Constantine White, and the generous support of the David Constantine White Will Fund. David set up the original Brier Hey Pottery in 1981. When he knew he was dying, he asked Sue Turner to keep the pottery open as a community facility.
This page explores his life.
A Halifax Lad
David John White – the Constantine would come later – came into the world in April 1948 and grew up in Halifax, West Yorkshire, a place he remembered with little fondness as ‘a town with a black wedding cake of a town hall and grubby from industry’.
Grubby it may have been, but Halifax had prospered handsomely in the first half of the twentieth century through the mining of coal and clay, brick and pipe manufacture, iron and brass founding and engineering. David was born into the heart of that hard-grafting industrial tradition and it is where his interest in clay began.
“My family did plan on me going to art school, but at that time I didn’t know what it was I wanted to do” DAVID WHITE
The Influence of Isaac Button
During his time at college, David learned much about the craftsman potter tradition of Halifax and how, in previous centuries, literally hundreds of kilns had dotted the local landscape, drawing their raw material from the clay so abundant beneath.
David was amazed to discover that one of those potteries was actually still working – the kiln was in Soil Hill just outside Halifax – and it was worked single-handedly by one Isaac Button. In David’s own career the influence of the solitary hard working potter is clear to see although Isaac’s guidance was powerful and functional rather than creative.
“Just dark brown and boring” DAVID WHITE summing up the potter’s prodigious output
Bonjour, Martin
In the summer of 1969, spurred on by his quest to discover France, David was hitchhiking in Avignon when he met a friend equally as full of youthful rebellion.
David’s meeting with Martin Lesoeur was to turn into a lifetime of friendship and many “sometimes dubious, shared passions”. Through their initial travels through France the friends knew only a few words of each others’ mother tongues. Their ability to communicate regardless helped to forge the best of friendships which lasted for the whole of David’s lifetime.
David’s relationship with France became an adventure which underpinned his life.
From autumn 1973 when David travelled to Dieppe by boat, then to Paris on foot with a sleeping bag under his arm, to Christmas 1976 in the Pyrenees, the adventure took on many guises. Eventually in early 1977 David made his way back to England with ideas of starting his own pottery.
“He had a few words of French. I had a few words of English. Enough to understand one another and find out more in the car that picked us up together” MARTIN LESOEUR
To Brier Hey
Arriving home in Halifax from France on a chilly February day in 1977, David faced a stark reality. He had a long-nurtured ambition to become a full-time potter, but a cancer diagnosis at the young age of 30, followed by an uphill health battle brought his ambitions into focus.
Driven by this new urgency, David eventually found a vacant workshop in Mytholmroyd and used spare savings to buy bricks for a kiln. That workshop was Brier Hey, which would remain David’s pottery for the rest of his life. It carried on for several years in David’s spirit but the pottery is now closed.
“It had made me realise that if ever I was to start in business as a potter, I had better get a move on” DAVID WHITE
The Love Affair With Clay
Something else the would-be potter couldn’t afford to buy was clay. But, following the example of his old mentor Isaac Button, David knew the solution – he would simply dig it up free of charge and process it himself.
Geology was another passionate interest of David’s and he knew that wherever there was coal, there would be clay. Years before, so many potteries just like Isaac Button’s were set up along the coal seams that lay beneath West Yorkshire for that reason – the 250 million year-old, multi-coloured sludge that was their precious raw material was so easy to come by. The clay was good and strong, capable of standing temperatures of over 1200ºC without distortion. All David needed was a shovel, and a lot of stamina. This is where his love affair with clay began.
“I have come to respect and love this clay,” David once said.
“It is a profound and ancient material” DAVID WHITE
The Self-taught Potter
It had been a source of painful frustration to the teenage David that all the available ceramics courses required more academic qualifications than he could hope to achieve.
Now, at thirty-three years old, with an albeit precarious financial foothold in his beloved profession now secured, he was determined to school himself in the art and science of ceramics. In order to keep the pottery roof over his head, David put his fledgling skills to work to produce saleable products such as piggy banks, parsley pots and eventually candle holders in the shape of Calder Valley landmarks.
“Busy for Christmas, and making money. The houses are selling well” DAVID WHITE
David The Teacher
Lack of academic qualifications ruled out a full-time teaching career for David White but, back in the early 1980s, appointments in adult education were made on a far more casual basis. If someone had a demonstrable skill, they could be employed with little formality.
And so it was that David was asked if he would like to teach pottery part-time at Calder College. He proved to be a good and enthusiastic teacher, and would continue working with those students until the early 1990s, moving gradually towards teaching glaze courses to students – this was another area where David’s passionate teaching style was successful.
“Quite apart from the fact that the small salary comes in handy, I’ve found that teaching has given me a lot more confidence in myself” DAVID WHITE
A Most Uncommercial Man
David White was dedicated to his work but he never showed the slightest desire to be part of the ‘art world’ – he was a most uncommercial man. He was the inveterate experimenter who revelled in the fact that no two pieces would ever be quite the same and for those who followed David’s work, the sheer unpredictability of his output was part of his great attraction as a potter. The late 1980s and early 1990s however, saw the advent of colour and experimental technique in David’s work.
1988: David finds a Moroccan plate glazed in the majolica method promoting a vast majolica glaze output at Brier Hey until the early 90s. His work became abstract and vivid.
Late 1980s: David perfected the “wax resist” technique, again enhancing his work in a colourful and unique way.
1993: David began experimenting with “lustre” using metallic compounds over a glazed surface. He started to generate the “spiky platinum” pot pieces.
1993 also saw David accepted at the Workshop of Ceramic Art in Tokoname, Japan where his refined and delicate fluidity of brushwork flourished.
“David didn’t conform to what an ‘artist’ should be . . . David didn’t work like that at all. For him, every piece had to be different, he had constantly to be developing the new ideas that were always popping into his head.” TIM LEYLAND
For The Love of Music
Although he would have regular visitors at Brier Hey, David White still spent many hours working in the pottery alone – that’s why music was so important to him.
It was not only a further outlet for his creative energies, but also an opportunity to enjoy socialising with people and to play his Hammered Dulcimer. Many of those musicians became firm friends over the years and very much part of David’s life.
“David brought a lot socially wherever he went, intense, interested in everything and impassioned. He’d lived such a varied and colourful life it was interesting. Socially and musically he added a lot to our group. He never stopped talking – because he was isolated much of the time in his pottery – music and social commentary, he was never short of an opinion on anything.” DAVID’S FRIEND, IAN LORD
Now There’s a Funny Thing
Everyone who knew David will mention his great sense of humour. Ian Lord remembers that David liked puns and wordplay and he loved the absurd. In David’s work, that came across in the witty nature of some of his figurative pieces. Elsewhere, his sense of fun could be much less subtle.
David wasn’t generally known as a teller of jokes, but in his journals he was in the habit of scribbling down gags that he had heard and presumably liked – and the evidence suggests a strand of his humour that might best be described as Beano-esque.
“Where do frogs put their coats? In the croakroom” DAVID WHITE
White’s White Whyte
From a very early age the bike had been more than a means of transport to David . . . it was his passport to freedom.
Writing of his early days in a Halifax that was ‘grubby from industry’ he quickly added, “ – but fifteen minutes on a bike, I was in the countryside.” David’s journal is peppered with references to his cycling to work, or simply for the sheer pleasure of riding.
David is remembered fondly for his love of cycling and one friend, Tim Goffe, recalls David browsing in a bike shop in Staveley in The Lakes.
The machine was by the top quality bike maker Whyte, and its colour was white. From that moment on, inevitably, David’s gleaming new steed was known to everyone as White’s White Whyte. It would be the last bike David ever owned.
“(David) saw a display of bikes and instantly fell in love with one of the models on display” TIM GOFFE
Later Years
As the world moved into a new millennium, the pattern of David’s work flows had become established. He continued to create his vibrant domestic ware which he produced in large quantities to provide a steady, though never exceptional, income.
Although the domestic ware was David’s main output, by 2001 his creative curiosity was also taking him in a very different direction with his much more reflective, inward-looking, figurative pieces. Many questions about David’s art centred around his figurative work and in particular, what inspired it and what was he saying through it?
Some years later, with this figurative work well developed and a regular part of his output, David said this of it . . .
“They are half told stories – incomplete images – stimulation for our memories – each one of us bringing different experiences to interpret what we see within our European culture” DAVID WHITE
“The tribal figures, I was fascinated by them, how he’d collect moulds. I remember heads moulded from Action Man would appear on all sorts of things!” JAN BURGESS
A New Inspiration
In the New Year of 2011 David knew he was seriously ill. His journal entries after that date record not an emotional decline, as might reasonably be expected, but a surge in energy with a creativity and thirst for experimentation.
Considering his medical condition, David managed to summon up an amazing amount of physical stamina, driven in part at least by his frustration at the idea of so much to do, with so little time. Drawing on this stamina, David made two defining trips during his last year. The first was to Burgundy in France to show at le Couvent de Treigny. The second was a trip to Barcelona arranged by David’s friend Tim Leyland.
On his return to Brier Hey David embarked on his own joyous celebration of form, colour and texture that, whilst inspired by Gaudi’ s freedom of expression, was entirely original. This final body of work, often strange, sometimes erotic, always rich in sinuous form and symbolism, was an amazing outpouring of all that David Constantine White’s life had made him.
The great artisan – driven by the most terrible of catalysts – was finally the artist.
“I did it [arranged the trip to Barcelona] simply because I knew he’d get so much out of it and that he would find it stimulating and exciting” TIM LEYLAND
“The future isn’t what it used to be, and what’s more never was” DAVID WHITE
