Dale Bowen is a senior artisan at Wedgwood and the only person known today executing the rare technique of Pate Sur Pate. Pate Sur Pate literally means paste on paste and involves the laborious method of imposing liquid porcelain, onto a porcelain body, freehand, in a process of building up thirty layers that are then chiselled and brushed back to form a sculpted multi-layered effect. The finished piece of Pate Sur Pate is then fired and the result is an exquisite translucent glass-like form on the vessel with very fine detail. Dale considers Pate Sur Pate the Holy Grail of porcelain techniques.
Pate Sur Pate was brought to England from France in the late 19th Century, Dale has taken this Pate sur Pate technique to it's limits in the creation of vessels of his own design that do not fall under the Wedgwood collection. Even his Pate Sur Pate work for Wedgwood is seldom offered for sale in the U.K. His vessels are of the moment and he sees taking his designs further into 21st century forms. He recognises that in perhaps fifty years with the closure of more and more pottery factories in England, Pate Sur Pate may be a lost art and his vessels the antiques of tomorrow.
"If you visit my six towns by rail" says Dale speaking of the Midlands "you arrive in Stoke-On-Trent, and upon exiting the station you will be greeted by a bronze statue of a man considered by historians as the father of English pottery, Josiah Wedgwood, and this man started the company where I am now employed."
Mintons however, became the more widely known company to produce Pate Sur Pate, with Louis Solon, Alboin and Lawrence Birks all becoming accomplished artisans of the technique in their own right. It is fine art in the ceramic world of the highest degree, and is only seen on some of the most expensive pieces of pottery. When Mintons decided to mark the first two hundred years of production with a hefty tome chronicling the companys history, it was by no accident they chose to display a piece of Pate Sur Pate by Louis Solon on the front cover.
Through the pages of this website you will see some stunning examples of Pate Sur Pate, all of which are created by Dale Bowen, with the exception of the Pate Sur Pate images on the History page, which are beautiful examples of legendary Pate Sur Pate artist Louis Solon. Dale's Pate Sur Pate skills are available for commission, information about this can be found on the
commissions page of this website.
"You cannot go anywhere in the potteries and not be confronted by our ceramic heritage, although there are only a fraction of the vast number of bottle ovens left now. They lie silent but if you look at them long enough they still take you back to those heady, industrial smoke filled days of decades past.
In some of the trades in the pots a century ago you were lucky to live beyond fifty years of age, and yet this is the period in England's ceramic history when we produced our finest works, and we ruled the world with our industry."
