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MARGUERITE WILDENHAIN THE POND FARM EXPERIENCE Selected for this exhibition is the work of students with a lifelong connection to Wildenhain. They acknowledge her critical eye and difficult nature, yet they owe much to her intense training and devotion to their development as craftsmen. Some have kept their aesthetic choices in form, content, glaze and decoration close to Wildenhain's, others have moved far away. A few are interested in contemporary art and they departed from ceramics to a variety of media. But the common thread that binds them is Wildenhain's doctrines. The students she both instructed and inspired are as much a part of her legacy as is her studio work. Some of Wildenhain's students are well known in the ceramics world and others are not. Most figured out a way to make a living doing what they loved and wonder from time to time what Wildenhain might have thought about their choices. A few have achieved national fame and most have attained regional distinction. Among her students there are professors and high school teachers, both active and retired. Many Pond Farmers have sales rooms and some have set up their own rural ceramics schools. There are Pond Farm couples who have worked together for a lifetime in their own pottery's and production potters who ship their work all over the country and/or sell at local or regional fairs.
The students indicate that the outcome from Pond Farm was the "process" of the experience rather than the product. Wildenhain understood that if the students could master the process of being a craftsman, then the mastery of their "objects" would follow. She respected the craft and the material for its abilities to structure the person and consequently mold a way of life. For 30 summers, students wound their way up the steep dirt road to the famous Pond Farm barn nestled in the dry hills above the Russian River near Guerneville, California. Many students traveled across the country to attend and most "camped" in primitive accommodations in town. The students rented rooms or camped in Guerneville and made the daily trek up "the mountain" to spend six or seven hours at their wheels. Marguerite and her teaching assistant, David Stewart, attended to each student with demonstrations at the student's wheels or an analysis of her/his work.
Students were thoroughly instructed on wheel techniques and how to develop a critial eye. The workshop was as demanding as one could find. Wildenhain's instruction was based on the European apprentice-journeyman model of solid technical foundations and a respect for traditional forms. Her methods were designed to provide her students with the skills they would need to make a living. The foundation skills and forms of Wildenhain's teaching methods were structured and narrow, with the teapot being the culminating shape. Following the beginning phase, she would pose individual problems to the students, encouraging them to seek their own solutions and find their own aesthetic voices. In the early years, after throwing five to six hundred forms, students might leave with a half dozen glazed pieces. In more recent time, glazing and firing were not part of the course and students took home a great deal of authoritative instruction about mastering basic form. From the first day to the last her advice and criticism were pointed. She might literally tear the pots apart. The work they made at Pond Farm was meant to be for learning about hundreds of pots they would make in the future.
Students wedged clay on long workbench-type boards outside their wheel boxes. Work stools were nail barrels. A portable wareboard intersected the long aisle workbench. The wooden wheels were designed by Wildenhain in a style of the Bauhaus model. The "thrower" climbed in a hole cut into a piece of heavy plywood; the thrower was seated on the surrounding plywood work surface. Inside the wheel box, two slanted footrests straddled either side of the kick wheel. Break time would provide an opportunity for students and teacher to gather at the front or back of the barn, or under the peach tree. During these times Marguerite would conduct a kind of al fresco seminar, holding forth on topics ranging from art and nature to music, philosophy and literature. While teaching pottery, she might talk about anything from leaf structure to bookkeeping, from literature to the American school system. Marguerite read from works that were important to her, and sometimes she illustrated or accentuated her remarks using her own ceramic work, or things she owned by Picasso, Feininger, or Marcks. Billie Sessions,
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