Pottery has been a part of me all of my life. As a child of the studio arts movement I grew up digging and preparing clay, making pottery and innocently absorbing a fairly technical education. Fast forward 40 years and I am running a pottery and honey shop from my own home studio.
I’ve never been an exhibiting artist. My comfort zone is artisanal production pottery that we offer in reduction fired stoneware glazes. This makes my twenty five years of ceramic experience is both broad and limited. Raising a family with four children as a craftsman, has perhaps been a higher priority than the studio career. It has been a monumental journey and my comfort zone has been a well established range of decorations with limited time to allocate to new work.
Now, every day presents the opportunity to do whatever I want and I’m excited to be under the tuition of a master from one of the world’s great ceramic universities. I have been using the chemistry skills I enjoyed at school to understand the theory behind the minerals we use to make glazes. The happy accidents are no longer. Through rigorous recipes recording and application, hundreds of test tiles have been made.
When I share them with our small team of potters in the studio, there is a great sense of achievement in the slight nuances in colour or texture. It's very exciting to be working on crystalline glazes and new colours that work in both our gas or electric kilns. It even better to be sharing these with Jacquie, who has just started her journey with clay.
For Open Studios this year, I've been working on a range of larger vessels and vases. I love taking extra time at the end of the day to work on them.
We started doing lessons as a pirouette to production. Its a nice little foray into sharing skills with people of all ages, backgrounds and in combinations of groups. To enable a Mum some special assistance as Dad fires off at racing speed, and the kids are engaged, and everyone learns something. It's not just about the pottery, it's the connections that are made and the laughs that are had. What we offer is an experience, using hands and eyes, to create long lasting memories. It's often the young ones who say they want to come back and do it again.
PS If I'm not on site, I'll be doing my spring beekeeping. I've got to do this to keep them alive!