CONNECT - people, art and place

The Vanner Gallery, Salisbury, September 17th - December 24th 2021

Salisbury has had a tough few years, but it’s kicking against the trend - three years after those poisonings, amidst the gloom of post-Brexit anxiety and a year and a half of hiding from the pandemic, a new contemporary art gallery is opening; a bold mark of intent and faith in the future of the city that is enormously optimistic and refreshing. Its location couldn’t be better, overlooking the medieval High Street gate into the famed cathedral close. When the tourists come back (and some have been spotted already) they will, at the very least, walk the quarter mile from that ancient stand of beautiful buildings to the handsome market square, and the Vanner Gallery is in prime position for any of them with eyes not glued to their phones.

I feel privileged to have been invited to show in the gallery’s first exhibition, curated by Prudence Maltby, who I’ve collaborated with on previous projects. Her idea was to pose the question, how have connections between people, art and places, as felt by the artists, countered the isolation we’ve all experienced during Covid-19?

For the exhibition I’ve made two pieces which pull together ceramic influences from East and West, uniting an eastern form, the moon jar from 16th C Korea, with a western decorative tradition. My twin preoccupations with more self-expressive surface treatment - borrowed from English West Country slipware and heightened during Covid - and the more anonymous, let-the-materials-speak aspect of glazed stoneware, descended from the centuries-old tradition of oriental ceramics, both seek the attention of the viewer.

As I’ve previously written, daily walks in the spring of 2020 were a necessary solace. To be able to lose myself in the emerging profusion of leaves and buds was for me, as for many, a distraction that fed into a renewed appreciation of how beautiful and varied the natural patterns that surround us are, if we take the trouble to look.

I’ve used sgraffito as a direct way of drawing on pots since I was at school, when I first learned about and emulated harvest jugs from Devon and Cornwall. These 17C earthenware pots were made to mark special occasions, always with a sense of bounty, and often covered in profuse decoration borrowed from leaf and flower forms. Returning to this theme was what pulled me back into making after the initial paralysis of lockdown; a far more expressive version of the more restrained surface treatments that had characterised my output before the pandemic.

Apart from referring to form as a shorthand for a particular shape, I should also underscore the importance of good form as one of the fundamentals of good pots. Really this is a universal quality of any pot that originally was made to fulfil a function, from African cooking pots to Vietnamese rice bowls. ‘Form follows function’ used to be the college mantra for domestic ware, and the form of a good pot owes its principles to engineering and architecture in the same way as a sound bridge or tower is made with an understanding of materials and gravity. The unadorned form of the moon jar exposes the swelling volume of its interior, and the way the narrow foot and wider lip makes the pot appear to be ready to float away, like the full moon in a dark sky. Decoration has to earn its keep on such a form, and can neither be an afterthought nor camouflage.

Inevitably there is a tension where influences come from different cultures, not just aesthetically but in what values are embodied in the work. Ceramic practice has always absorbed and reflected the influence of cultural meetings. This was particularly evident in the Oribe ware of 16th C Japan, when Portuguese traders first had access to the previously locked-down country and western motifs began to appear in the Japanese arts of the time. Since college days I’ve been fascinated by the cheek-by-jowl proximity of fluent pattern-making and luscious, pooled glazes on the same pot. It was a reaction to the austerity of the ceramic practice which held sway up to that point, and expressed an energy and joy that for me is irresistible.

In 20th century and contemporary ceramics the tension between apparently ‘spiritual’ eastern and more ‘self-conscious’, design-led western practice has at times been the subject of intense debate. It began when Bernard Leach came to England and introduced the Oriental aesthetic to pre- and inter-war England and reached a crescendo in the 70’s and 80’s. A moon jar which Leach purchased in the East, and brought to England with him, he subsequently gave to Lucie Rie, whose seminal work owes nothing to the oriental tradition. This seems to me to be a point of focus in the dialogue about the twin threads of why we make pots - to belong to an anonymous tradition of a noble culture, or as an act of individual expression? These are not mutually exclusive motivations, but it’s a rare potter now that doesn’t sign their work. In today’s brand-dominated market it is practically a necessity, and I have lost sales due to an unclear maker’s mark on my work. My guess is that there is no maker’s mark on that ancient moon jar, which paradoxically perhaps now occupies a prized place in the Korean gallery of the British Museum. This classic Korean form, originally made for storage, is thus elevated in western ceramics to its iconic status.

Today, the noise of debate has quietened and the sources of inspiration of makers’ work are often taken for granted or unremarked, or lost in the plethora of unattributed images crowding the internet. Still, the influences and embodied values remain evident and distinct, and sometimes defended, in the work of makers aware of even the main threads of the histories of world ceramics.

In my jars I am attempting to synthesise influences that are equally important to me; and perhaps in doing so, asking a more overt question on where we stand today on the blending of cultural ideas. Is borrowing other traditions appropriation, or to be celebrated as a continuing, creative and appreciative response to the inevitable cultural mingling of our interconnected age?

Where are we headed?

I was lucky; I trained in the 70s when applied arts were confidently supported in our education system: potter's wheels and kilns in the school art department; several dozen undergraduate courses to choose from after ‘A’ levels; good facilities and peerless tutors at my art college. After graduating I did a PGCE in Art Education; taught in a big comprehensive and an FE college, then left formal education for a near- 20 year stint as Artist in Residence at Salisbury Arts Centre. Alongside my own making I taught 6-90 yr-olds; anyone who wanted to come - always busy, always oversubscribed. Learning skills is a need that lies deep in the human DNA. I became part of the community glue, and have continued to teach since leaving the Arts Centre.

A couple of years ago I stretched to taking on an apprentice who was supported partly by a charity. I'm glad to have been able to do it, but feel that opportunities are too few to develop the next generation of professional makers. Current TV offerings notwithstanding (offering more entertainmant than insight) there is a general ignorance of the excellence of British Craft. A few years ago I was visited by my MP; in his column for the local paper the following week he commented how nice it was to see someone make a business out of their hobby. He was Under-Secretary of State for the Arts at the time, and clearly had not a clue about what it takes to make and keep an Arts career going..

Over the last 20 years the economic contribution made by the crafts sector and its buying audience has quadrupled* while school and college training provision has plummeted. For decades Government policies have consistently undervalued the economic and social contributions of materials skills. The pandemic has underscored the importance of creativity and making; it’s what humans evolved to do. Currently we have an X shaped graph: rapidly increasing demand for technical skills is sliced through by declining training opportunity. It’s a story of inexorable de-skilling, at a time we need to be nurturing our homegrown talent.

* £.8m to over £3 billion (Crafts Council)

Julie Ayton FRSA
www.julieayton.com/new-products
https://www.instagram.com/julie_ayton/

Green shoots

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.

Potting in lockdown

It's a pretty big thing to get your head around, isn’t it, a global pandemic? On an everyday scale we’ve all found new routines, some more welcome than others, but I’ve found it beyond me to really grasp the scale of parallel experiences that are being felt across human populations worldwide. Once we left casualty numbers in the hundreds they got too big for me to take in. I can only comprehend the impact of my own local situation, the empty town square and the cancelled markets, the queues for the pharmacies and deserted evening streets. I take on trust the pictures and reports I hear from everywhere else, and can relate to them as far as they compare to my own experience.

As far as that goes, life changed overnight for me, as it did for nearly everybody. My sociable weekly classes stopped, galleries closed and events and fairs started being cancelled in a staccato beat that became a crescendo in the first weeks. The comfortable humdrum of familiar daily life was lost in hurried adaptations to new routines with edgy undercurrents of anxiety and welcome relief from bursts of irrepressible, if not slightly hysterical humour.

So a few weeks have passed, the corners have been knocked off the new routines and many of us have had more time than we’re used to to reflect on where we are. I have spent the newly discovered hours finally getting around to building my website shop, with the aching guilt of not having done it years ago beginning to be blotted out by the satisfaction of seeing it realised, and - yes! - of attracting sales. Hooray! and Thankyou! if you are one of my new customers; you have cheered me immensely and I know the effort and sometimes frustration of learning something new has been worthwhile.

I have also been invited to make videos to demonstrate throwing techniques, and had a heartwarming and encouraging response to them from both potters and students, and people looking to see something a little different during their extended screen time. I’ve started off with a series on the stages of making and putting together a teapot. The positive feedback has helped to fill the social void scooped out by the cancellation of my workshops, and to make me feel that I’m still passing on details of time-worn learning of my own. This seems to be more of an imperative as I get older. There’s a long journey from one’s own training in a discipline to teaching it. Recognising the moment-to-moment micro-decisions that you make in real time is necessary before you can articulate them to an audience. I miss the immediate prompt of students’ questions, so it is a more reflective kind of demonstrating, but I found it less daunting than I anticipated and will continue to add to those I’ve done so far. You can see the videos by following me on Instagram and searching the IGTV button, or find them here:

Teapot making, Instagram TV

At present I continue to cancel my one-day and short courses on a rolling basis; of course it’s disappointing, but in the grand scheme of things it is immaterial. I’m in the same position as most others, and luckier than many. I have a studio to work in, a garden to play in and, so far, have lost no-one to the disease which has changed everything including how we need to arrange our priorities, as well as our working routines, probably well into the future.

Of course I’m looking forward to welcoming potters back into my workshop, and sharing practical experience and knowledge face-to-face. All the same, there will, I hope, be changes that become permanent, changes that are long overdue, particularly in relation to how we exploit our resources and environment. The pressure of an immediate crisis has shown that we really can change our behaviours when we are sufficiently motivated.

We have rediscovered many of the benefits that those changes have brought, in an astonishingly short time: shouty birdsong, home-cooked food, less traffic and pollution, a better understanding of supply chains, increased awareness of local community and geography and a renewed appreciation of the things we queue to buy. They are some of the benefits that would follow from a rethink of how we tackle the more incremental crises of thoughtless consumerism; escalating waste; climate change. It will be a challenge to keep those benefits in view, as our reward for changing our attitudes and ingrained habits, as we emerge from our strange locked down spring. In the meantime, I’ll continue to adapt and search out ways to help enshrine another of the human treasures that we have rediscovered is central to all artists and makers, and vital to human happiness - the instinct of making, of skilled creativity, and of sharing it as broadly as we can.

Tuning In

Why thorough preparation is good for the material and the maker.

Many years ago I learned a little about Chinese brush painting. Before even picking up a brush, the first task was to grind the solid ink stick with water on the ink stone to achieve the deepest possible black, opaque and syrupy, to be progressively diluted for all the lighter tones when painting.  Watching the ink gradually thicken as I circled the stick a hundred times clockwise and another hundred anticlockwise was quite hypnotic.

The meditative action of grinding the stick on the stone was helpful, our teacher said, not just to prepare the materials properly, but to ready our muscles and minds for the painting ahead. It was important to ease away tension and encourage an alert, but relaxed state of mind and body that would be reflected in unforced, confident brushstrokes.

I think about this often when I wedge clay ready for throwing. Today the sense of heightened awareness could be called mindfulness. Noticing the gradually improving texture with each cut of the wire is calming. It doesn’t feel like a chore, but a rewarding process of conditioning the material, improving its plasticity and tuning in to its consistency while limbering up my arms. It gives me time to focus on the pots I’m about to make and anticipate the flow of clay through my fingers.

I also think about Paul Barron, the tutor at Farnham who taught us the efficient rhythm of wedging back in my student days. I’d seen pictures of Mick Casson wedging in the book of the 70’s TV series, The Craft of the Potter, but it was Paul I learned it from: Cut in half; lift; drop; rock; turn over; rock again; give the clay a quarter turn and drop the far end on the batt; repeat. His showpiece was to ask a student to push a small coin into a whole bag of clay (20 kg then, making our 10 or 12 kg bags today look puny). He would, he said, find it within 10 cuts of the wire. As far as I know, he always did, but it was really the fluent, energy-efficient way he placed and handled the heavy mass of clay in a series of concise moves that was impressive.

He used his whole body, with the mass of clay extending towards him over the front edge of the bench. When he cut through it the front half would drop onto his knee, which he’d use to help bounce the clay back up, reducing the effort needed to lift it above his head. It would slam back down onto the half on the batt, expelling air and spreading the clay back out to near its original proportions.

As he wedged the clay he explained the process, and how it interleaves the irregular soft and firmer parts so quickly and thoroughly. The original mass, after the first cut and drop, becomes two layers, and the number of layers continues to double with each cut of the wire, to four, eight and so on. Ten cuts produces over 1,000 layers in the clay; 20 over a million. During each sequence the clay is rocked back down to its original thickness, compressing the interspersed layers so that they are completely amalgamated.  The clay’s consistency can be fine-tuned this way, by adding a piece of firmer clay if it seems too slack, or smearing on some throwing slops if it feels too stiff.  The differences are quickly worked in, and over time the conscious judgment of whether the clay is ready becomes an instinct. The pocks and ripples disappear and the smooth, cellulite-free surface seems almost elastic.

Paul also described how individual clay particles are flat, and that the plasticity of clay is credited to the ability of these platelets to slide over each other’s surface film of water.  The compression of wedging forces the particles into parallel layers, like coins finding their most efficient arrangement, improving their readiness to move, sliding over each other. Wedged clay has a grain, a definite advantage for slab building, adding strength in the flat plane. Accurate wedging also ensures that the clay surfaces are always convex, so that the impact of the top half thrown down onto the bottom half can’t trap, and instead expels air.

Follow the link or cut & paste into a new window to see the video: https://vimeo.com/285708633

For throwing small pots I weigh the wedged clay and then knead each piece in my hands quickly to establish a concentric pattern to the particles, so the clay has a head start on the wheel, the platelets ready to slide over each other as they move around and upward. For bigger pieces I spiral knead on the batt, another distinct and efficient way of mixing clay that is less uneven in texture, and of stiffening overly soft clay.

Throwing is a practice that demands more of clay than any other, apart perhaps from pulling handles. Good preparation not only makes the job easier, it sometimes makes it possible. Throwing with poorly prepped raw material is a miserable experience, especially when learning. While a pugmill will mix anything thrown into it, it does nothing for plasticity, or for the sense of understanding intimately the nature of the clay that is gained through handling it directly.

These preparatory processes and the time and skill they take is invisible in the final pots, but have contributed enormously to my own pleasure in making. They are time-honoured methods still unbettered by any machine for priming my raw material, and me, for the task in hand.

Not all a maker's work is making.

It's rather a long time since I've put anything fresh on here, so no time like the present. I've been busy, along with two friends, in organising a new show for makers who throughout their careers have shown evidence of a strong sense of enquiry. I have been contributing to a blog on the project's website, and thought it worthwhile to share our posts here too. 

See details of the show and the makers taking part at craftpraktis

This year's 'praktis/ exhibition at Bury Court near Farnham in Surrey presents a group of makers who have spent years developing their creative voices to produce distinctive work that is both highly skilled and deeply personal.

Behind every artist and maker, whatever their discipline, is a story of discovery.  Like many others, my own interest in clay was born when, as a child, I was bundled along to a Saturday morning art activity session for children. My first creation was a galloping horse, main and tail flying, sinewy legs outstretched. I was in another world.

I don’t know what happened to it, but that really doesn’t matter. The making of it was the thing.

With hindsight, I can see that the reality was a stodgy sausage-creature, an unruly clutch of straw stuck up its bottom. But what also remains true is that the act of creating something takes us, in our heads, to a different place.

We humans have evolved to create things with our hands, and our brains are hardwired to spark and respond to that instinct – to be curious about what materials can do, to experiment, to interpret the world, to express ourselves. And, over time, to learn to use our hands as readily as our imaginations.

Those of us who have made a life of making things are following that impulse to create with our hands the vision in our heads, and to do it better and better. It is challenging, sometimes frustrating, but deeply satisfying when things go well. As a maker, to see someone 'get' your work is confirmation of a shared recognition, of having hit the right note.

The getting of knowledge is a lifelong process. And gradually, as we exhibit more widely and connect with those who appreciate what we do, our enquiry and thinking becomes still more sharply focused. Feedback from our audiences informs our ideas, sometimes confirming our impulses, sometimes challenging them.

So we never stop learning, and as makers we never stop responding to the fascination of what can be done with materials and processes, whether to meet a practical need - a favoured cup to drink from - or to create a work that defies practical purpose but simply delights us with its human ingenuity, mastery of process, and its beauty.

The exhibitors showing at ‘praktis/  at Bury Court Barn this October are makers who have established themselves through years of refining their practice, and are still looking for ways to move forward creatively. At this year’s exhibition, in a wonderfully sympathetic setting, we will be showing fresh and inspirational work across disciplines prompted by a strong sense of enquiry, with illustrated talks and demonstrations and an invitation to talk to pre-eminent makers about their craft.

Between now and October, through this blog, you are invited to share some of their insights, find out what inspires them and see examples of polished skills, the trial and error that leads to successes and occasional failures, and above all the thinking that goes into the work of 21st century makers.

Please follow us on Twitter @craftpraktis and call back if you'd like to see how we progress towards our exhibition, and share with your friends.

In praise of making things

We humans are driven to make our mark somehow. Creativity is an intrinsic element of being human.  We are excited by the creation of music, drama, literature, art and architecture, they are, ultimately, the core and sometimes the fossils of civilizations. We particularly value those achievements which outlast a single life, and instinctively feel poorer when they are taken from us.  Without disregarding the deeply depressing current human catastrophe of the Middle East, the destruction of ancient archaeological sites in Syria and our reaction to the devastation points to an enduring notion of how we value our ancestors' ability to speak to us through the things they made.

Physically, too, we have evolved to make things. Our marvellous opposable thumb is served by an amazing brain that enables us to realise our ideas through our hands. Our distant ancestors made things all the time; skill to explore and exploit materials was essential to survival, and then became a way to express and record our interventions and sense of world order. Although social structures seem to have divided makers into the most lowly and the most revered people, in different times and places, expertise in making has always had value.  

In fact, it's not just our distant forebears who were familiar with tools and materials in an everyday sense. Some of our parents and grandparents made shelves, clothes, garden swings; mended cars, agricultural machinery and made preserves, often from necessity rather than to fill free time.  I was mildy shocked to hear recently that only a small minority these days knows how to wire a plug.  

As advancing and cheaper technology takes the making of things further from individuals, it takes away some sense of everyday purpose, and maybe connectedness with our physical world.  The virtual world swims around our heads. Shopping from a keyboard is, it turns out, not really a substitute for holding an object with a known, perhaps personal, history.  Dad's toolbox, Granny's pincushion: bought stuff often just doesn't carry the same emotional charge.  Similarly, pinging off emails can only go so far.  What's to show for it at the end of the day?

Perhaps the nostalgia laden interiors of ye olde country pubs are just that: a rose tinted view.  Life was undeniably harder for great grandad, but those folksy ornaments do illustrate the way we yearn for the days when expert making skills were seen daily in plain view, and universally understood.

The Beeb's Bake Off, of course, feeds off our yearning to get our hands dirty again, to make stuff, and the Pottery Throwdown too.  Like many involved in pottery in a serious way, I have mixed feelings about a telly programme which often trivialises and even misrepresents our craft at the service of arbitrarily imposed timescales and 'entertainment' value.  Still, it has struck a chord with many who feel the need to reconnect hand, eye and brain, and to experience firsthand the satisfaction of making, and on balance a second series is a Good Thing.

Any creative activity is rewarding; the immediacy of forming responsive clay particularly so.  As I suggested earlier, our hands and brains have evolved to support our long-ago urge to find out what materials can do.  The ability to use a material well remains psychologically supremely satisfying. A child exploring the possibilities of mud is engrossed, and rediscovering that fascination as an adult is a magical experience. 

Clay is better than mud; its potential far greater: it holds its shape; it records impressions; it hardens, can become permanent. I bet I'm not the only potter who still finds that sensation of wet clay in my hands the most compelling, intoxicating, addictive thing.  Seeing a potter's thumbprint left on an ancient shard shrinks time to nothing.  We are still connected. 

Tell Halaf pottery jar, Syria, 5th millennium BC