Rupert Spira talks about his work as a potter and how this intertwined with his spiritual studies.
At Rupert Spira’s home in Oxford, surrounded by an overwhelming display of pots and bowls, we discussed his life and work as a potter. On the table next to us was a huge, beautiful open bowl with fine but illegible writing etched into the whole of its upper surface. But our discussion was not confined to ceramics. From the age of fifteen, Rupert’s love of truth and love of beauty became intertwined and ultimately inseparable, his spiritual studies informing his work as a potter and vice versa.
Rupert’s interest in ceramics began when he was completely blown away by a retrospective exhibition of Michael Cardew’s work. He later worked as an apprentice for Michael, a difficult character who could be both kind and ferocious.
Rupert’s early pots were very similar in style to Michael’s – solid, heavy and earthy. But over several years, his own style gradually emerged in response to other influences, both outward in the form of the modernist aesthetic and inward through his study of non-duality. His pots became finer and finer and the decoration increasingly minimal, either no decoration at all or just fine, narrow parallel lines. In time, the lines were replaced by poems, sometimes etched illegibly into the surface of a bowl with a sharpened needle, and sometimes embossed. Rupert’s poem ‘I Am’ was partly the result of this development.
The large bowls were intended as works of art, but Rupert was also commissioned to produce tableware. A wonderfully perceptive passage from Michael Cardew’s book A Potter’s Wheel explains how tableware, used every day, has the same power of communication as museum pieces. We went on to discuss the importance of the sense of touch in the appreciation of pottery and sculpture.
Rupert described his time studying with Francis Lucille as a second apprenticeship. Before he met Francis, he felt an unresolved conflict between his love of truth, expressed in his study of non-duality, and his love of beauty, expressed in his ceramics. Francis showed him how the path of knowledge and the path of beauty are essentially the same path.
A severe test of the depth to which Francis’s teaching had penetrated came in the form of a huge fire at Rupert’s pottery in Shropshire which destroyed most of the building. While the fire was raging, Francis’s wife, Laura, gave this advice: ‘Be aware of any impulse in you to change the current situation’. How could that be possible in those circumstances? It was Francis’s teaching that sustained Rupert through the difficult years ahead.
One day, the thought arose, ‘I would love to make bowls just out of words’. Later, while travelling to Edinburgh for an exhibition, Rupert started writing a series of essays, later published as The Transparency of Things. A new career in writing and speaking had begun – not by intention but through spontaneous impulse.
Rupert made the transition from clay to words; could the next refinement be to lose the words? Truth and beauty merged in silence.
If you'd like to explore these themes further, Rupert's book A Meditation on I Am (2021) features the poem Rupert engraved onto large bowls. The book also incoludes a short afterword, 'Bowls out of Words'.
You can listen to this episode on the Rupert Spira Podcast.
To learn more about Rupert as a potter, we would recommend watching Helen Millers' video, River of Words
