While working alone isn’t at all unusual for makers and artists, lots of us who normally teach regularly will have noticed more and more the absence of our students over the last few months. Mine bring a joy and an energy to the studio that is now a memory of a connectedness and of wider lives that background radio can’t replace.
Writers, of course, are renowned for working in a kind of self-imposed lockdown most of the time, famously in sheds. I was struck by the story of Annie Proulx spending months together in her distant cabin, forcibly protecting herself from distractions while she wrote. Very, very disciplined. More recently, Simon Armitage has been inviting literary friends on Radio 4 to ‘join’ him in his, and it’s easy to see why. Sometimes distractions are a good thing, and we’ve all needed them recently.
At first, like lots of other potters, painters, jewellers and makers of every stripe, I found I didn’t want to go into my workshop. Motivation seemed to have drained away. What’s the point of making when shops and galleries are closed and fairs and events have evaporated from the calendar? While we often work alone from day to day, like everyone else artists operate in a wider circle of creative, inventive and differently talented people. They are the ones who complete the cycle of making: creating demand, finding appreciative audiences, educating collectors and selling our work. We depend on people who do the stuff we can’t do alone, and it seemed that those connections too had been stripped away.
Just as we have all found a new appreciation of our local neighbourhoods during lockdown, the wider network that supports makers has come more sharply into focus for lots of us who spend the majority of our time alone in our sheds. It’s not unusual to hear artists complain about the level of commission charged by galleries or the cost of trade stands at arts fairs, but acting as an introduction and recommendation agency between individual makers and the small minority of people who are seeking just our kind of work is a very particular specialism. There are good and less good galleries and shows, but all the alternatives for makers seeking a way to market demand similar financial investment in other people’s skills and contacts, or substantial time and effort developing our own. Shops, galleries, arts fairs and selling online are all part of the mix. Most of us do a bit of all these, and they all require extra skillsets, commitment and investment.
At the time of writing I should be throwing open my workshop doors and welcoming the public to the start of my summer open studio event. It’s part of the local Art Trail, when the arts community of Salisbury scrubs up and puts its best foot forward. There’s a real buzz of anticipation and a burst of creative activity as the clock counts down. Artists club together to find venues, studios are spruced up, windows washed and finally the paintings and bunting go up, hot pots are popped on plinths and a rash of signs all over town proclaims that artists’ sheds, workshops, potteries and studios are open to visitors. It’s exhausting, but it’s great!
This year we’ve been missing all the face-to-face energy that usually carries us along, and as the spirit of creativity inevitably and hopefully raises its head again, finding online outlets for our work has become more important. As I’ve previously written, I used the first weeks of lockdown to get my website shop up and running. It was a start. But being invited to take part in MADE London’s newly established MADE MAKERS online fair in a couple of weeks has given me a bigger boost, and I’m sure others too. Because what we are all really missing is the sense of cooperative effort, that feeling that we are part of the bigger community; one piece of a huge kaleidoscopic pattern of colour, shape and invention. We are connected again, and we have a deadline to meet!
You can find more details of the show and makers taking part at: mademakers.co.uk
So what has this spur to action sparked for me? Like lots of us, I’ve been out walking much more than usual, and the exceptional, almost surreal perfection of the loveliest spring in years has been a hugely welcome distraction of the best sort. The chorus of birdsong can’t fail to lift mood, and in parallel to the profusion of garden blooms it’s been impossible to ignore the variety of wildflowers emerging in woods and hedgerows, some familiar from childhood, some seen but never named, and I’ve rediscovered my daydreaming fascination with the bounty of their natural patterns and rhythms. I’ve taken photos, but done precious little drawing, although I’ve meant to. Time yet, I suspect, and I’m letting that particular bubble of guilt slip its moorings and float away. Being able to reconnect with an aimless and timeless love of shape and form in the moment has been a balm to be unquestioningly accepted. Back in the studio, I began to want to express some of this.
I have been making poetry bowls for a while, and am fascinated by the way combinations of words conjure images in the mind’s eye. I’m not a calligrapher, but I enjoy the flowing action of drawing a point through leather-hard porcelain, and the pattern-making potential of strings of letters. The bowls lend themselves to mark-making, and to marking significant moments, communicating feelings and observations, wit and wisdom. They are a combination of two loves, and a good starting point to get back into expressive work.
Once I’ve found a way of rendering a poem that I’m happy with I’m also happy to return to it. It’s nice to be commissioned to put others’ favourites onto porcelain too, so the repertoire is widening. I’ve enjoyed easing myself back into these, and there’ll be some available, I hope, for 13th June.
So, back into making, back into decorating too. Time to drift a little deeper. Occasionally I make a short series of porcelain pieces that are purely an outlet for my urge to decorate. Like the poetry bowls, these pots don’t fit into my production of tableware, and I have struggled in the past to justify them. Decoration with intent was regarded ambivalently, if not with outright suspicion, when I was at college, and it’s been a hard view to live with. But it’s an itch I have to scratch, a channel for my love of pattern and its honourable place in the histories of pottery worldwide, and it tends to strike inconveniently when deadlines loom.
I often find when trying something new on these pieces that I’m restless to begin with, anxious; don’t know how to start, and the fear of failure is hovering in the background. The pots in the raw state when I decorate are very fragile; a false move can mean a sudden ending and wasted effort. I can’t do it in the morning; my fingers and muscles are stiff and need time to limber up, and my mind too. I’m looking to get into a kind of semi-awareness, not too self-conscious. A kind of active daydreaming. Often the radio goes off, and I try to take a sideways approach, catch myself unawares.
To start with I usually sweep the floor or wedge some clay; mindless stuff to ease into the real focus. Then I’ll do a bit of turning or banding, or some more familiar decorating. Then I’m there with an empty bowl in my hands and there’s nothing for it but to take a deep breath and dive in. I’ll put some pencil lines across the surface, breaking it up into zones. Because I’m working in monotone, the techniques of inlay and sgraffito work well. They can give me complementary areas of light with dark marks and dark with light marks. As I relax I begin to enjoy the balancing act of playing them against each other. I have a sense, but not a prescription, for how it is going to look when it’s done. I’m making it up as I go along, and finally I’m drawing, filling the spaces with positives and negatives. Each one is a sort of meditation, a visual poem of memory and invention and inevitably they don’t all reach a conclusion. Never mind.
These one-off pieces are time-consuming; slow making. I don’t anticipate repeating them, so they will end up as a series of unique but related pieces - a slow growing family, springing from shared sources of inspiration and impulses of expression. They are a kind of stilled record of a very peculiar spring; a time of looking both outward and inward; of rediscovering and responding to deeply felt connections with our tangible world here and now, and being content to breathe in this ever-extending moment.