The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
His oversized pots grab attention in gardens
Stephen Procter’s creations liven up outdoor landscapes.
Flowerpots, they are not. But Stephen Procter’s large stoneware garden vessels, some as tall as 5 feet and incorporating 250 pounds of clay, are nevertheless functional pottery — even without the soil and the plants.
In the clay world, he said, there’s always talk about functional versus nonfunctional pottery, attempting to draw a line between the two. Procter, a Vermont-based ceramist, has seen his and other such outsized garden sculptures in action, though.
“An object that invites contemplation, and inspires, and offers this kind of mysterious sustenance is functional in a deep and important way,” he said. “Not functional that you’re going to drink your coffee out of it, but the work has high purpose in the landscape and in the world.”
A substantial sculptural element can perform a variety of garden-design jobs, he added, strengthening the structure of the landscape by “calling attention to its junctures: the entry or the transition point or the destination.”
Procter has watched the space-transforming powers of ceramics at work for roughly 20 years, since his first installation in a client’s garden, and observed the audience reaction at outdoor shows of his work at public gardens like Blithewold, in Rhode Island, and the Mount, Edith Wharton’s home in the Berkshires of Massachusetts.
It’s like the Wallace Stevens poem “Anecdote of the Jar,” he said, which tells of a round jar placed on a hill in Tennessee, and what happens to the scene in response.
“The wilderness rose up to it,” the poet wrote. “And sprawled around, no longer wild.”
Inspiration from seed pods, hives, cocoons
The lesson for gardeners: An imposing piece of pottery can be pivotal to the design of a landscape — as much so as any well-placed plant. Maybe even more so, if it is winter-hardy like one of Procter’s high-fired clay vessels, which are persistent garden performers in every season.
To his eye, pieces with an organic shape fill this role especially well. He describes his shape aesthetic as “an amalgamation of classic Mediterranean pot vernacular and forms inspired by nature: seed pod, hive, cocoon.”
It is the pots’ shape and scale that do the job. He leaves the surfaces simple, without colorful glazes or decoration.
“I find that decoration tends to narrow what the pot can be to somebody,” Procter said. “It specifies it in a style, or specifies it in an era or a culture, and I’m much more interested in the sort of Rorschach inkblot, an object that somebody can take wherever they want it to go.”
The vessels possess an “animate presence,” he said, that clients and their garden visitors interact with intimately, by touching them and even speaking or singing to them.
“They approach them as if they’re friendly ponies,” he said. “They’ll stroke them, they’ll hug them, and they’ll always peer into them.”
For one couple whose garden is home to a creation of Procter’s, that life force feels so strong, they refer to the pot with a personal pronoun.
“She brings a breathing focal point that both grounds the garden and merges it with the surrounding woods and mountain,” Ingrid and Jim Miller of Dublin, New Hampshire, wrote in an email to Procter.
Garden roles for a sculptural element
There are a number of roles that such sculptural elements can play in the garden. Sometimes, when two pots are placed in a garden space, a duet begins — even when one of them isn’t of heroic proportions.
“There can be a much smaller pot at quite a distance that would feel lost by itself, but it somehow belongs to that bigger pot,” Procter said. “And people draw very strong imaginary lines between the vessels. The mind and eye want to connect them.”
Elsewhere, a large vessel may create a center point from which other elements in the garden will then seem to radiate. As in the Stevens poem, Procter said, it’s as if “the pot reorganizes everything around it.”
When used to mark a transition between garden areas, he said, the vessels “become a greeter, if you will, to this new part of the garden that you’re moving to,” or they mark a turn or bifurcation in a path.
“When placed carefully,” Michael Gordon, a garden designer in Peterborough, New Hampshire, told Procter, the vessels “bring a feeling of both surprise and serenity to the journey down a garden path.”
A few clients have used one of his pots in a manner that has fascinated him: placed next to a very large rock. “It somehow tames the rock,” he said. “It doesn’t diminish it in some way, but it adds this other element and starts a conversation between the wild and the made that I find mysterious and interesting.”
Some outdoor sculptural elements can beckon loudly from a distance: when a formal pot is shown off in a formally designed garden, for example, perhaps set upon a plinth.
But Procter is often happier when the lines are a little fuzzier.
“A pot that’s more organic and wild sometimes is more alluring when it’s partially obscured by foliage, and it creates this intrigue: ‘What is that? What’s the rest of it? How do I understand it?’” he said. “And that can be, in some ways, a more compelling and alluring kind of draw than the one that reveals itself all at once.”
As Bess Haire and Chris Gunner of Jaffrey, New Hampshire, wrote in an email to Procter, “More than just ornament, the pots are to us barometer, mirror, company and sentinel.”