page_title: Michael Cardew
section_title: Africa
hierarchical_section_title: Michael Cardew / Africa
caption_attribution_description: English: Michael Cardew Bowl
context_page_description: Michael Ambrose Cardew CBE, was an English studio potter who worked in West Africa for twenty years.
context_section_description: Wenford Bridge did not make enough money to support Cardew and his family, and in 1942 he accepted a salaried post in the Colonial Service as a ceramist at Achimota School, an élite school for Africans in the Gold Coast (Ghana).  Although Cardew's main motivation for taking the post was financial, he had become convinced (partly through his reading of Marx) that there should be a closer relationship between the studio potter and industry.  Following the outbreak of war, the school's supervisor of arts and crafts, H.V.Meyerowitz, recommended that the pottery department should expand into a handcraft-based industry that might provide all the pottery needs of British West Africa.  African colonies had hitherto depended on the export of commodities, but enemy shipping made this almost impossible.  The Colonial Office adopted instead a policy developing indigenous industries and eventually accepted Meyerowitz's idea.  They agreed to fund the Achimota pottery, which they intended should become profitable, and hired Cardew to build and manage it in nearby Alajo.  This gave him the opportunity to apply his ideas on an industrial scale, and he went to the task with enthusiasm. The pottery employed about sixty people and had large orders from the rubber industry and the army. However, it did not meet its production targets and was unprofitable.  There was an apprentice rebellion and a huge kiln failure.  Cardew admits that his enthusiasm developed into fanaticism. In 1945 Meyerowitz committed suicide.  All these disasters led to the closure of Alajo.
  In 1945 Cardew moved to Vumë on the River Volta where he set up a pottery with his own resources.  He chose to remain in Africa partly to erase the failure of Alajo and partly to vindicate the ideas of Meyerowitz, to whom he felt he owed a debt. He records in his autobiography his obsession to prove to the colonial administrators "that they were wrong to close down Alajo, and that a small pottery in a village would be successful in every way, provided it was allowed to develop naturally." He struggled with difficult clay and kiln failures for three years and later judged the Vumë  pottery to have been unsuccessful, but its products are among his most highly regarded pots.
  He returned to England in 1948 and made stoneware pottery at Wenford Bridge.
  In 1951 he was appointed by the Nigerian government to the post of Pottery Officer in the Department of Commerce and Industry, during which time he built and developed a successful pottery training centre at Suleja (then called "Abuja") in Northern Nigeria. His first western student was Peter Stichbury. Another of his western students at Abuja was Peter Dick in 1961-62. His trainees were mainly Hausa and Gwari men, but he spotted the pots of Ladi Kwali and in 1954 she became the first woman potter at the Training Centre, soon followed by other women.  As a result of Cardew's extensive contact with and admiration of African pottery, his later work shows its influence.  He returned to Wenford Bridge on his retirement in 1965.
caption: Michael Cardew Bowl made at Wenford Bridge
exif: {"Image Make": "NIKON CORPORATION", "Image Model": "NIKON D40", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Ver.1.10", "Image DateTime": "2014:10:11 12:58:18", "Image Artist": "Picasa", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image ExifOffset": "216", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "3666", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "8310", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/400", "EXIF FNumber": "10", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Unidentified", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "200", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2014:10:11 11:07:19", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2014:10:11 11:07:18", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF CompressedBitsPerPixel": "4", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "9/2", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF LightSource": "Unknown", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "38", "EXIF SubSecTime": "90", "EXIF SubSecTimeOriginal": "90", "EXIF SubSecTimeDigitized": "90", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1747", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1699", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "R98", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "Interoperability RelatedImageWidth": "3008", "Interoperability RelatedImageLength": "2000", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "3518", "EXIF SensingMethod": "One-chip color area", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF SceneType": "Directly Photographed", "EXIF CVAPattern": "[0, 2, 0, 2, 2, 1, 1, 0]", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF DigitalZoomRatio": "1", "EXIF FocalLengthIn35mmFilm": "57", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF GainControl": "None", "EXIF Contrast": "Normal", "EXIF Saturation": "Normal", "EXIF Sharpness": "Normal", "EXIF SubjectDistanceRange": "0", "EXIF ImageUniqueID": "725a425e5bbe339b5cafe6ed34ac274b"}