My journey in pottery began last year, when I decided to start an evening class with the local Adult Education service in Cornwall. My fairly varied career, which has included teaching Craft and Design in secondary and special education, as well as working in a self-employed capacity as both a photographer and furniture maker, took yet another change of direction when I moved to Cornwall with my family in 2005. Since then I have worked mostly as a service engineer, and was feeling that my life lacked any creative stimulus, and it was with a mixture of scepticism and excitement that I started my initial course back in September 2014. Scepticism because I felt sure that it would take years of training to even begin to churn out pots of a reasonable standard (especially given my inbuilt tendency towards perfectionism), yet excitement by the prospect of beginning to learn a new and creative skill.
Much to my surprise, though I was never keen on some of the basic techniques of pinching, slabwork and coiling, I did find that I immediately enjoyed the process of throwing, and as long as I didn't get too ambitious, I could centre the clay, hollow and open it out and throw a basic cylinder from the first few weeks of the course.
Now on my second, slightly more advanced course, I have become fascinated by both the process of ceramics, and inspired particularly by Japanese and Korean pottery, as practiced by both historical and contemporary potters, such as Shoji Hamada, Ken Matsuzaki and Lee Kang-hyo, as well as those western potters using similar techniques, particularly wood firing, and creating work influenced by eastern ways and following the styles and techniques brought back from Japan by Bernard Leach.
The list of names of potters that inspire me grows by the day, as do my Pinterest boards, full of images of pots by the likes of Svend Bayer, Nic Collins, Phil Rogers, Edmund de Waal ,
The aim of this blog is to keep an on-going tale of my progress and setbacks as I work through my course and develop my skills.
