Honored among foxes Phil Rogers at Pucker Gallery BY JEFFREY GANTZ
	"Past and Future: Pottery by Phil Rogers" At Pucker Gallery, 171 Newbury Street in Boston, January 8 through 31.

It’s a little superficial to compare Phil Rogers with Dylan Thomas just because they’re both Welsh artists. They don’t look much alike: Rogers, who was born in Newport, in the southeast of Wales, is a big, bearded man with big, sculptor’s hands. Still, when you survey Rogers’s pottery at the Pucker Gallery, it’s hard not to think of Thomas’s country heaven where bushes and owls can blow out like candles and we yet lie in grace, "Sleep spelled at rest in the lowly house/In the squirrel nimble grove, under linen and thatch/And star." The color of gooseskin winter and black buried spinneys and an ox-roasting sun, Rogers’s pieces — mostly pitchers and bottles and cups and bowls — have the smell of hay in the snow. Like Thomas, he locates the mythic in the everyday.

It’s all home-made. In his 1992 book Ash Glazes (A&C Black), Rogers explores the physical properties of various trees (apple, beech, oak, pine, spruce, willow), the chemical composition of the ash (silica, alumina, phosphorus, etc.), the question of whether to wash the ash, the addition of minerals like quartz and feldspar, or clay, or coloring oxides. He’ll scrounge pruned wood from nearby orchards or oak chips from local smokehouses or granite dust from a quarry. Crooked rather than curved, the handles of his pitchers seem an extension of the overall shape rather than an addition, honoring both eye and hand. The pitcher glazes in this show range from tenmoku (black with hints of lawless sun) to nuka (sheepwhite) to pine ash. The nuka and pine-ash pitchers have a homely but artistic "pellet decoration," blobs of buttermilk rain in vertical rows. One tenmoku pitcher has a similar "raspberry" decoration; another is "sprigged." A third, taller tenmoku jug has vertical "combed strips" of ox blood; it’s closer to Milan than to Monmouth.

The bowls and bottles have a more Oriental aspect — Rogers has set up a women’s pottery project in Ethiopia, given a workshop in Cape Town, taught salt glazing and kiln building in Korea, and judged a show in Kansas, so his experience and his inspiration are hardly provincial. A tenmoku jar has those same combed strips, but they’re more subtle, and around the top, there’s a broad, nuka-like collar. Another tenmoku jar is faceted into what look like oversized tortoise-shell plates, and here the nuka top splashes down like cream. A number of salt-glazed pieces rested on shells during the firing, so that the shell pattern appears in the result; one plate is described as having been "fired on Cape Cod shells." A nuka bottle has a "wiped decoration" in an ash-like color that suggests a series of fat weeping-willow leaves; a rectangular nuka bottle has two longer leaf-like swishes that could be a designer’s signature mark. A similar rectangular bottle, this one glazed in ox-blood iron slip, has its sharp edges offset by a vertical representation of the broomed witch’s spume in wax resist, another hearthstone tale for the prayer-wheeling moon. Some orangish bottles have incised grasses; others done in a chalky slip have finger-wiped and incised willow-green fish.

Rogers’s cups and bowls range from Newport to Nagasaki. On the Oriental side, there’s a fish cup to go with the bottles, and two squat wood-fired cups with brown leaf patterns against the chalky slip, and a nuka cup with spiral motifs and a tiny bowl with brushwork. More indeterminate is a tenmoku cup in thin rings of black and ox blood with a fat nuka collar spilling down. A simple wood-fired cup looks almost Celtic; so does a salt-glazed one with feldspar inclusions whose color conjures Thomas’s "fire green as grass." Two wood-fired salt-glazed cups splotch and swirl in a spackling of brown, rust, and white that hovers between galaxy and gravel. Seven cups done in porcelain, as opposed to stoneware, are salt- and ash-glazed, haygold with infusions of fox and bands of hawk-eyed dusk.

Rogers’s shapes seem to evolve out of the clay; hardly any two are alike. The pitchers and cups, especially, tend to be compact, even squat, a bloom of wayside brides proceeding from imagination to incarnation. Rustic and redemptive, they’re candles in Thomas’s country heaven. The dead oak walks for love.