David William Lane (1929-2019) trained at Bournemouth College of Art under David Ballantyne, who ran the ceramics department there. Ballantyne was a potter, painter and teacher, one of the more influential figures in mid-century British craft, whose approach encouraged experimentation rather than adherence to any particular tradition. That Lane came through Bournemouth rather than through the Leach orbit goes some way toward explaining why his work looks the way it does. It owes nothing to the Anglo-Japanese aesthetic that dominated so much British studio pottery of the period.
Lane had his own workshop from 1959, five years before Abington. By the time he moved to Little Abington he was a fully formed potter. In 1964 he and his wife Erika moved into a medieval hall house in the village, a few miles south of Cambridge, and established the Abington Pottery. The building had been divided into three cottages and was in poor condition when the Cambridgeshire Cottage Improvement Society bought it in 1954 for £160. The Society let the Lanes convert it into a combined home and pottery.
Lane made a substantial range of domestic ware throughout his career, much of which was sold from the shop at the pottery and at Cambridge Market. Erika ran both. The domestic ware was well made and found a ready market. But it was not what Lane was most interested in making.
The work he preferred making was the sculptural and unique pieces. He developed a highly personal palette of opaque eggshell glazes, applying thin metallic oxide washes to unfired stoneware before a single glaze-firing in an electric kiln, producing colours and finishes that are entirely his own. The incised decoration often used fine abstract lines. Sometimes they were multiple straight lines at varying angles to one another or below applied in broad sweeping gestures on a plate.
Nature runs through the work frequently in colours, textures and shapes. Leaves, fish, fronds and creatures. The sculpture below is a duck form and the sgraffito bowl draws on nature shaped motifs. The pattern could be a leaf or the legs of a many-limbed creature.
The pottery shop closed in October 2014. Lane continued making pots until the end of his life. He died in May 2019, aged 90. A tall stoneware vase, made around 2010, was given to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge by his family when the pottery closed. Its body is incised with an abstract leaf pattern, with dark blue eggshell glaze. It remains in the museum’s collection.