Materials and making

Clay

Naturally occurring stoneware clay is not easy to find in the UK and so I use a manufactured body: Draycott White Stoneware, from Potclays in Stoke-on-Trent, which seems to suit what I want to do.

When it comes to earthenware things become more interesting as there are many natural clay deposits which will yield clays suitable for firing at earthenware temperatures. More work is involved in clay preparation, but nothing brings a more intimate connection with your material than finding it, digging it from the ground and getting to know it’s characteristics as a making material.

I first tried working  with so called ‘wild clay’ at college when the foundation excavations for an extension to the buildings turned up a ready supply of clay to experiment with. However it was not until more recently, and particularly with the Lossenham Pottery Project, that I really started to work with wild clay more systematically. I sense it is the early stages in a long journey of learning to read the nature of different clays, and understand how to work with them, but I love the resonance there is in making things so directly connected to the specific places in the landscape.

There are more thoughts and information about wild clay collecting and processing in the journal.

Making

My pots are largely made on the wheel, although I also use hand building (coils, slabs) for some pieces, and sometimes a mixture of coiling and wheel forming where this seems more natural, or is more necessary, for a particular form.

Having been taught on, and for many years used, an electric wheel, I have recently switched to working mainly on a foot powered (treadle) wheel - similar in principle to a Leach wheel - which I acquired, defunct, many years ago and never had space to set up. It needed completely rebuilding, but the medieval pottery project gave me both the excuse to do this and the space to use it. I am learning the adjustments of throwing technique required, and relishing the quietness and rhythm of the process (if sometimes missing the power of the electric wheel when centering large pieces of clay!).

When making on the wheel I like to get pots as close to finished as possible, and generally I try to do little if any turning (trimming the leather hard pot on the wheel).

Glazing & decorating

With pottery what interests me most is form rather than decoration and so I tend to use glazes or slip decoration which respond to the form of the pot, rather than using the pot as a canvas for more designed decoration, whether figurative or abstract. In the medieval pottery (and the places where this influence finds its way into other pieces) I do like the use of applied, or incised, marks on the clay surface, though again most of these are about accentuating form.

For stoneware work I try to keep my glazes as simple and sustainable as possible, using basic ingredients such as feldspar, quartz, clay and wood ash, and sometime colouring from iron, and occasionally copper, oxides. With earthernware I use a simple transparent glaze (usually boron, rather than lead-based) over clay slip, in some cases with colour from red, yellow, or black iron oxide.
These approaches provide a restricted palette, but encourages me to think about the decoration as an enhancement to the form of the pot rather than an end in itself.

One reason for keeping the glazing process simple is that the pots are being ‘raw-glazed’ - that is the glaze is being applied to the dried clay, rather than to clay which has been part-fired first (see ‘Firing’ below). This is not without its challenges: you can’t put watery glaze on a raw pot for too long before it turns back to mud!