cord pot

This pot is one of the results of a recent pottery class at the local pottery workshop. I like it and am glad that it survived the attentions of the tutor who tried stamping it while wet with prefabricated manufactured stamps (you know the type I mean!). Have you ever encountered a tutor who tries to be really hands on with your work? It was my first time and I was so surprised! David had the same experience at the same workshop and I thought he was exaggerating but it was true - people really do come over and put their hands on your work and try to manipulate the clay on your behalf. When I came to pick up my pots a few weeks after the course I even discovered that someone (no doubt with the kindest of intentions) had glazed the pots which I hadn't had time to do. It was a huge contrast to other workshops I've potted at and it felt All Wrong. Now that I know how things can operate there I'm going to become more assertive. It's a really lovely place to do pottery and the people are great so I do need to find a way of making sure that I don't feel my work is being interfered with.

brown spot pot

As you may be starting to gather from my pottery explorations, I'm not a very exact kind of potter! David came home with a few of his new pottery creations last night and I was amazed by how perfect they were - the attention to detail was incredible. I tend to just throw things together. In the time it takes David to make one thing, I may have made three or four things. This pot was made about two years ago in Wellington. I spent ages applying the glaze, thinking that every colour spot I made would stay where it was when I fired it ... but they didn't! And I ended up with this blurry, faded, version of what I had imagined. But I still liked it, and David liked it even more, so I gave it to him. When I was building this pot I was thinking of this enormous hand-built pot I saw in a pottery book (damn, I just went and had a look for the picture, but it's hiding). It was huge! It was maybe 5 feet tall and all hand coiled. My pot is tiny, and was never going to be tall, but the thought of that other pot is somewhere imbued in it's essence.

These days the brown spot pot sits in the kitchen filled with: two sets of keys, several coloured pencils (blue, red, orange, and green), a one dollar coin, a green ribbon, two plastic pegs (one yellow, one white), a plastic container of sewing pins, a silver bracelet, several nails, a needle, an Allen key, and an I love Hackney badge.

seafloor pot

Hello! Welcome to my burgeoning little blog! I've been planning on doing this for ages - somehow capturing all the things I create before they disappear into the hands of loved-ones, near and far - and here we are! So, to get the ball rolling, here is a pot I made ... I don't know ... ages ago! Probably about four years ago. It's amazing that it has survived this long because over the past four years I've moved house at least eight times. It's a seafloor pot. At the time that I made it I was swimming in the sea every day. I lived on a hill and if I walked along my hillside road and then walked down some very teetering and narrow precarious steps, I would arrive at a lovely little pebbly beach where I would swim. Naturally enough, spending so much time in the sea one starts to notice all the things around ... like the clouds changing, growing and disappearing in the sky (when you're floating on your back) .... and the sand, stones, fish, weeds, and other mysteriously sea-smelly things beneath your feet when you're wading through the water. So this is the result of those sea-swimming days.


When I moved from this sea-swimming place (to another sea-swimming place!) I would walk on the beach every morning before catching my train to work and pick up a shell ... usually a cats-eye ... to deposit in my seafloor pot and now there are many, many shells living in this pottery seafloor home. As you can see, there is also a seahorse living in this pot ... a gift from a friend who loves seahorses and wanted to give me a special gift ... and here she resides! Among the shells in the seafloor.

And that's all for this first, exciting post. More things of a handmade and slightly peculiar nature to follow!