Issuu

I discover clay

Three weeks old, in the hands of my grandfather, Frank Gadsby. I never really knew him, since he died when I was four. He’s still remembered, though, notably for his kindness.

Holly Cottage, our idyllic small house in the countryside, surrounded by acres of green.

I SOMETIMES FEEL as if my life didn’t really begin until I started throwing pots. Until the age of sixteen I more or less lived online, peering into a virtual world. After arriving home from school, one that was so focused on craft , community and, often, spirituality, I would come in and switch on a screen to forget reality. My hands were moulded around a lump of plastic, a video-game controller, but this was soon to be replaced by a lump of soft, malleable clay.

I was born two months premature, incubated, only a speck in my grandfather’s sturdy hands. We lived in a quiet village in Norfolk called Maypole Green , where hedges, dank ponds and furrowed fi elds make up a majority of my memories from this time and all I have left are ﬂ eeting sounds, smells and stories I’ve been told. Our home was surrounded by what I remember as dense, monolithic hedgerows and we spent our time outside in the garden, running in the neighbouring fi elds, building dens and climbing branchy, wavering trees. We followed the tails of our cats who lived happily in the abundant greenery, apart from Dotty, a mean, scrawny white cat, spotted black, who would hiss hellfire as soon as we tried to stroke her.

I was six years old when we moved to London in 1998. My father’s commute into the city had become untenable and so we left the green surroundings for residential –and still comparatively green – north London, packing everything into a house on a corner next to Alexandra Park. We were downsizing, and my father still tells the story of how he burnt many of his belongings in a heaped bonfire prior to leaving, both as a means of accommodating his possessions in a smaller home and as an expression of protest, since he really loved the countryside.

My father, Mark, spent decades working in advertising; he was a successful art director and travelled relentlessly, even assisting in introducing McDonald’s to the UK at one point, but his heart was really in making, in craft. Alongside his career he pursued this passion, and throughout his life he has also been, and still is, a woodworker, metalworker and jeweller, and an acclaimed illustrator. He has long blond hair, like me and my brother, a kindly, crooked smile and thick-rimmed spectacles – the resemblance we share is at times uncanny.

My mother, Kate, is a photographer and gardener. As a parent she is carefree and never once questioned the choices I’d make in my life. She’s sharp and keen -eyed , quickly loses her temper and has a vast knowledge of the world, languages and the plants she surrounds herself with. She cared for Anatole and me, photographing gardens whilst we were in school. Tolly, which is what I’ve called my brother since I learnt to speak, is four years older than me. He has my dad’s blue eyes; I have my mum’s freckled brown. He’s left-handed like my dad, I’m right-handed like my mum. We grew up in houses crowded with pots, paintings and sculpture. My father even made pots of his own, the pieces once photographed by my mother, a picture that has come to sum up my life quite succinctly.

Th e new house was in a leafy part of the city, in an area built up with rows upon rows of houses running up and down the surrounding hills. It was all new to me, with vistas limited by buildings wherever I looked. As we first drove into London on the dreaded moving day we stopped on the side of the motorway, the skyline glinting in the distance, and I followed the ever - dwindling, glowing streetlights along the twisting road as they disappeared into the skyscrapers on the Isle of Dogs. That was in August, a few days before my birthday, and just a few days later I started at my new school in Kings Langley, which was a Waldorf Steiner school. In 1919, a year after the Great War ended, the educator and spiritualist Rudolf Steiner visited Waldorf-Astoria-Zigarettenfabrik , a cigarette factory in Germany. Emil Molt, the owner of the

My father’s porcelain pots, captured on film by my mother. He learnt pottery as a release from the mayhem of working at Saatchi & Saatchi. I can’t remember ever being in his metalwork shop, but I certainly recall the sound of beating metal and the slick smell of polish. He hammered tableaux that were photographed and used to illustrate the New Scientist, and crafted the symbol that represented Britain’s millennium celebrations at the Dome in London.

Home after primary school, with the outline drawing of a battle - tank in front of me, drawn by my father for me to colour in. Resting my head on our forevercrammed kitchen table, Sea - Monkeys and all.

factory, asked Steiner if he’d like to set up a school for the workers’ children – the doors opened later that year and the fi rst Waldorf Steiner school was established. Th e curriculum was based on Steiner’s anthroposophical philosophy (which encompassed the arts, architecture, agriculture and medicine) alongside the more traditionally academic school subjects. Anthroposophy is a way of life, a spiritual movement even, which claims to link the arts, the sciences and religion, aiming to nurture the soul in each of us and in human society as a whole. Steiner thought that we, as humans, were fashioned from spirit, soul and body, and that these developed throughout childhood and into adolescence.

I went into this education at six years old and found myself in a system that I adored, but which also contained some highly dubious ideas, embracing a multitude of pseudosciences – if you look far enough back, you’ll discover that Steiner himself had some rather frightening ideas concerning race and ethnicity. During all my time at Kings Langley, though, I can count on one hand the number of times we were taught anything actually anthroposophical. Steiner’s philosophies may have created the underlying infrastructure for how these schools are run, and many of his ideas remain, but many others have become outdated over the past century and aren’t taught – or, at least, they never were to us.

My parents decided that my brother and I would go there after visiting the school with friends to pick up their kids. Th ey saw young children playing in lush gardens, where there was an emphasis on exploring and being outside, on playing, on socializing and singing together. Th e school wasn’t rigorously academic and the teachers they spoke to made it apparent that they wanted to focus on the children simply being themselves. I’ve never been a spiritual person, my family certainly isn’t either and even though we spent singing lessons chanting hymns, we also sang Th e Beatles and Frank Zappa. For me, singing the Lord’s Prayer had nothing to do with religion; instead, I revelled in the comradeship of being

in a choir. Singing together, working well together and functioning as a community is, to me, what this system taught exceedingly well.

Th e Goetheanum, the building in Switzerland at the centre of this anthroposophical movement, looks quite unlike anything else. Th e exterior is built entirely from cast concrete that was poured into giant wooden moulds crafted by boat builders, for the obvious reason that they knew how to craft seamless, curvaceous structures. Right angles are few and far between and even if you search you’ll have a hard time finding many, save where the building meets the ground. This is one of Steiner’s philosophies: he thought that buildings should follow the human form, avoiding straight lines and harsh angles and, instead, embracing rounded edges, curves and billowing shapes.

Th e inside follows suit, but instead of cold concrete it is clad with warm wooden ﬂoors and furniture, the walls are painted with shades of soft primary colours with ethereal, angelic figures materializing from the contours of the brushwork, and there is colourful stained glass that bathes the curved rooms in swathes of beautiful light. Steiner believed that colour and human souls were intimately connected, which they might be, but he also believed that mushrooms weren’t to be eaten as they grow in dark and squalid places and contained hindering lunar forces, so I’ll let you think that over.

Steiner and the Waldorf education I had played a tremendous role during the first quarter of my ceramics education, and I want to put everything in context. I very much gave myself over to the craft and academic aspect of my Waldorf Steiner education but the other parts, the spiritual side of things, fell ﬂ at. I was placed into this education as a young child so it’s imprinted onto my being whether I like it or not, agree with it or not. All I know is that I probably wouldn’t be a potter had I not gone there.

My kindergarten mirrored the Goetheanum and it genuinely did feel like a mystical dwelling taken straight from the pages of a children’s book. It was in an entirely separate part of the school, hidden

Celebrating my sixth birthday in kindergarten, wearing a pastel paper crown in front of a student - crafted mosaic depicting a haloed saintly figure, roses and doves.

behind trees with a litt le winding path through some woods. It was surrounded by arching concrete walls that enveloped two large classrooms with wooden floors trodden smooth with the patter of tiny feet, fi lled with miniature handcrafted wooden furniture fit for five-yearolds. Part of the façade was covered in handmade mosaics; some tiles gilded gold that glinted in the sun. Th e smell of beeswax wafted through the corridors and light trickled in gently through wafer -thin, silky curtains that were draped across windows that had no right angles. Th e rooms themselves didn’t have severe corners, only soft angles. Even the paper we used in the early years had rounded corners.

Inside we’d sing and play games. Our toys were wooden or made from other natural materials and there wasn’t a single piece of plastic in sight. Th ere were no worksheets and no tests. Instead we sat in circles and learnt to knit together and throw and catch soft , handwoven balls and create ghostly woollen fi gures, angels, to place atop Christmas trees. Our teachers were kind and gentle, and often they’d be joined by younger teachers in training, or even students from the upper school returning to lend a hand. It was tranquil and otherworldly, and as a child I felt free, cared for and happy.

Before we were allowed to graduate from kindergarten to class one we’d have to pass a ‘class one readiness’ evaluation. A teacher took us aside individually to ask us questions. We’d play catch and throw a ball up into the air and grab it with one hand and hop around on one leg in various directions, then they’d look at our drawings done with thick slabs of coloured wax (pencils weren’t allowed yet). Th ey’d observe how well we could finger -knit and tie our shoelaces, and test our memory, imagination and social skills. If we passed, we’d then be ready to move onward, and Th eo, my new best friend, and I gleefully advanced together.

Class one doesn’t begin until you’re six years old, following the way children are taught throughout much of Europe. If the body isn’t ready to learn then the mind isn’t. (Steiner believed that children weren’t

ready for an academic education until their milk teeth started to fall out.) Th is means that children taught in a Waldorf Steiner school start learning to read and write later than in most schools in the UK. Children being taught in Europe aren’t expected to be able to read and understand written language before the age of six or even seven, as a child who only just has a grasp of the language orally shouldn’t be expected to be able to write it down. Reading and writing didn’t come naturally to me. My teachers consoled my parents, telling them not to worry and that I would get there eventually. My mother thinks that it’s partly due to my obsession with our family’s brand -new computer and keyboard that finally all the letters began to make sense for me. Th ey were all there, organized and in neat rows, and I just had to go back and forth across the keys to construct the words I wanted.

As we learnt to read and write we also practised what’s called form drawing. We’d sketch out repeating patterns or we’d take certain shapes, drawing them out multiple times and rotating them across the page. Most importantly, we’d take a page and bisect it from top to bottom with a line. Th en, with a wax crayon or pencil in each hand, we’d simultaneously draw on either side of the line. Our hands mirrored each other as they moved, sketching a complex, winding line, both hands following the same route but reﬂecting the other. It’s a task that helps to grow children’s sense of spatial orientation and I adored it – the smell of the warm wax on my fi ngertips and the symmetrical, weaving, colourful lines. My drawing became more confident and I found joy in creating strong linear patterns and shapes that slowly became more intricate, both hands working in unison, very much like they do when you’re throwing on the potter’s wheel.

Clay was a material used extensively throughout my Waldorf Steiner education. As children in kindergarten we’d dig it up from a deposit in the grounds beneath the roots of a soaring pine tree at the end the long garden. We’d mould the gritty red mud into lumpy animals and figurines that were baked alongside the bread we’d

cook in two towering wood - fi red brick ovens. Th e clay wasn’t fired to a hot-enough temperature to last and our creations, scorched black, would crumble and chip.

I wish I still had some of those pieces as they’d complete my archive, but some things are perhaps better kept as memories: fragments are what I have left of this time, strewn throughout my mind. Rudolf Steiner thought that playing with clay, or even sticky mud, and moulding it, would activate your hands. Children will subconsciously take clay and shape it, turning their imagination into physical entities as they press their digits into it and, therefore, over the years clay remained a substance that we persistently used. Not only in our official pottery class but in main lesson too, which is what we called the first two hours of class every day.

The subjects taught in main lesson changed periodically. Five weeks could be spent learning about Norse mythology, then for four weeks we’d all be outside in the crisp cold in our wellington boots building a new fence or planting trees. We’d even plough fi elds, dozens of children forming lines and heaving with all our might the heavy metal ploughshares through the earth in the school’s gardens. Each class had its own plot of land and throughout the early years we’d spend a few hours a week planting, weeding, ploughing and, fi nally, picking berries and making creamy ﬂans topped with sweet redcurrants that we all gorged on in the sun.

We would learn about Roman history, and in doing so we spent time in the pottery, which, like the kindergarten, resembled another small Goetheanum of sorts. It had walls of red brick interrupted by strangely shaped windows and was topped with a green, angular roof, a contradiction to Steiner’s beliefs. Th e pottery lay on the cusp of the cricket fi eld, at the extremities of the school’s grounds and, technically, ‘out of bounds’ to the lower school students during break times. It stood alone, surrounded by grass, with a short path snaking to it. It was the first pottery I ever knew and it was a quiet corner, away from the bustle of the main block of buildings.

This was the school I grew up in, on ancient grounds in a landscape that was open and green, a stark change from the city I lived in. We were given stupendous freedom during our lunch hours to explore and play and there were forested areas we were allowed to build dens in, and classes would wage war with each other over building materials, sturdy logs, rare planks or branches that made good spears. Months were spent constructing these dens, some even had a second ﬂoor and towers that followed trees into the air, only for them to be dismantled between terms by the groundskeepers, to our collective horror.

AS TIME PASSED , we began spending more time in the pottery. We’d shuffle out of our classrooms after registration and walk the five minutes through the grounds to the workshop. Weeks were spent rolling out slabs of thick earthenware clay that was cut into mosaic pieces which were glazed according to the designs we chose for giant murals of animals that ran along the walls in the lower school’s corridor. Th ey were crude and colourful, the tiles anything but perfect and blobbed over with glaze.

My first experience with a kiln was during one of these morning main lessons. As a class we constructed a small wood -fired lime kiln, built initially from wicker that was then smothered in coarse clay laced with straw. We took turns stomping this mixture together with our bare feet. Our aim was to produce lime mortar for prehistoric-style huts we spent years building as a class, with low ﬂ intknapped walls topped with watt le and daub and with a tall thatched roof. Sadly, not only did the lime kiln collapse mid -firing, as we all watched in despair from our classroom window, the structure sagging and spilling over, seeping hot embers and molten iron and lime across the grass, but our huts were also burnt down, rumoured to have been set alight by students from a rival school nearby.

Our education was hands on, but it also delved into all the normal subjects every school teaches, as told by a slogan the school plastered on the side of its minibuses, ‘Head, Heart and Hands’. Th e idea was to teach in

a balanced way, equal parts head – the academic stuff –heart – to create students that are passionate – and hands – to teach children to be practical, to understand how the objects around us are made, where food comes from, and all the processes involved to get it from land to table. As a class we visited local farms, learnt how to grow our own vegetables, planted trees and pressed juice from apples we’d watched grow. All of this might sound very trivial, or obvious, but I don’t think many schools and groups of children experience these things. I was in a privileged position to be there – the school is private, after all, with expenses that rise gradually throughout the thirteen years – but one day I hope this approach bleeds into the mainstream education system, as it has done in Scandinavian countries. I don’t think it’s any surprise that those nations consistently come out on top in quality-of-life surveys. Alongside studying craft s, which quickly became my favourite subjects, we had to practise dance, more specifically Eurythmy, an expressive, flowing, moving art form Rudolf Steiner created together with Marie von Sivers, his second wife. We’d don colourful smocks and matching plimsoles and, as a piano was played, we’d dance together and move our arms in such a way that reflected words being spoken; it was ‘visible speech’. Th ere were movements for consonants and vowels and our arms and hands would fl utter or form shapes in sequence to spell out words or our own names. We’d move as a group in such a way that mimicked a poem spoken in conjunction with the movements, our Eurythmy teacher reading, us moving. It’s said to help with a child’s spatial awareness, which it certainly did, as whilst constantly facing forwards we’d have to tiptoe backwards and loop around to fill the spaces others were moving away from. As children we enjoyed these classes but as young teenagers, we grew to resent them. Dressing up in colourful smocks that billowed as you moved and gracefully waving your arms around clearly wasn’t cool. We were beginning to drink and smoke and listen to heavy metal, and Eurythmy was the last thing any of us wanted to be doing.

Th en, as we matured the opposite happened. By now we had decided on the subjects we’d like to study, yet Eurythmy persisted, if you wanted it or not. Eventually, when we were all bogged down for hours a day in the library, swotting for exams and writing papers, or in my case making pots and studying art history, Eurythmy classes were a chance to decompress. We didn’t have to read or write or deliver arguments or take tests. We simply, almost subconsciously at this point thanks to more than a decade of practice, moved together. It was a welcome reprieve, even if it was just for one hour twice a week. We could switch off, listen to the piano and move as one.

POTTERY CLASSES BECAME more frequent as we got older. Our class of thirty-something students was split into four groups and we’d rotate between different craft s throughout the year. Th ese four crafts might change from year to year but primarily they were pottery, metalwork, woodwork and fine art. Being youngsters, the classes were somewhat chaotic, as you might imagine when there’s one teacher trying to show twelve or so inattentive students how to slowly hand -build pots.

We started with soft wax before moving on to clay, then we pinched pots. This is when you take a soft lump of clay, usually patted into a round, ball-like shape. You then push your thumbs into the centre to create a well: this is the base of your pot. Next you rotate the vessel with one hand as the other pinches the walls of the doughnut shape, pressing them ever thinner and finer and forcing the clay upward. It’s slow, repetitive work and something I avoided at all costs when given the option. Following this came carefully modelled animals, imitations of our hands and, finally, we worked on constructing exacting platonic solids.

Now we had enough skill to start coiling pots, which is the process of laying down a base before slowly adding to the walls coil by rolled -out coil, shaping and smoothing it as you go. After this was slab building, where thinly rolled -out slabs are cut and joined together, like folding up a cardboard box, only the joins are

reinforced with scoring and slipping – the clay is roughed up with a serrated edge, and then dabbed over with watery clay which acts like a glue. Th ese pots are often angular, at least the rudimentary vessels are, and I made grey cubes, doused with ﬂowing green and brown glazes, that stacked together poorly. Th en eventually, and at long last, we were shown how to use the potter’s wheel, a contraption on which pots could be quickly fashioned. In a lesson where you might be working on just a single slab-built pot you could throw a dozen or so on the wheel, at least with practice.

My first ceramics teacher was Caroline Hughes. She was known as being the strictest of the art teachers at our school and I now know why: you can’t be lackadaisical in a ceramics studio without it descending into utter mayhem. Clay sculptures and pots take up space in ways paintings and drawings don’t. Potting also creates dust and is, well, extraordinarily messy, especially in the hands of children. If you do let it get out of hand a workshop can quickly become impossible to work in comfortably. Not to mention that the powdery dust that’s produced slowly embeds itself in your lungs like tiny shards of glass.

Caroline came to ceramics as early as I did, studying it throughout school and college. She trained as a teacher but also spent time production throwing at Carlisle Pottery, throwing masses of domestic stoneware and honing her skills. Raising three children intervened but finally, after seeing an advert in a local pottery guild magazine for a pottery teacher at the Waldorf Steiner School, she found her way back to clay. She wasn’t drawn in by Steiner and his philosophies, rather it was the pottery that brought her there and I’m so thankful we crossed paths.

She brought into being a bellied vase with a collared neck and ﬂared rim in what seemed like seconds, before plucking it from the wheel and setting it gracefully aside, as if by magic. I was completely transfixed. Th e process is hypnotic, the wheel spins, the clay follows, a ﬂ uid, ever -changing lump that wobbles and moves upward as it is shaped by the hands that guide it. When an experienced potter throws a pot it looks effortless.

The first two pots I ever threw, which were made in the school pottery, below, on an old, worn Alsager potter’s wheel. Red and green, misshapen and heavy, but a start.

No strength is needed and the hands miraculously create something from nothing. I couldn’t wait to try it myself and rushed off to prepare my clay, a process that’s always necessary when throwing on the wheel.

Clay comes into studios in various ways. You can have it delivered in sealed bags, soft and ready to throw with immediately, or you can order sacks of powdered clay that you water down yourself until it’s the desired consistency for throwing, hand -building or slip casting. You can also go out and dig your own clay. In some rare cases dug clay is usable straight away, but you can also dry it out in the sun, crush it to a fine powder and sieve out any impurities, pebbles, roots, or leaves there might be. This powdered clay can then have other materials such as feldspar and silica added to it, or it can be used straight, the whole lot wetted down once again to your desired texture.

At school we had it delivered in bags, malleable and ready to work with, although even though the bags are tightly sealed it may have been sitting in a warehouse for months or years – which is a good thing as it means the clay is given time to age, improving its plasticity and therefore the workability of it. Most commercial clays aren’t dug straight from the ground, where they’ve already been ageing for millions of years, and sold. Rather, some clay suppliers purchase the raw, powdered materials and mix their own blends of clay together in-house.

Th is ageing process can also cause the clay on the outside of the block to become fi rmer than the clay in the middle, which means that, once opened, these bags of clay need to be kneaded to mix and amalgamate the various textures so it’s completely smooth and even throughout. This is a process that can be done in several ways. You can wedge it up by hand, in a similar fashion to kneading bread dough, or it can be run through a machine called a pug mill, which chops through it and extrudes out completely blended lengths of clay. Beyond just making sure it’s even in texture the aim is also to remove any pockets of air there might be within the clay, so the clay’s folded and rotated so that any voids of air are popped.

And so there I sat, with yet another ball of clay in my hands, clay filling up the wheel-tray and clay spattered on the walls around me. I span the wheel and I struggled to create anything. It might look easy, but attempting to get your hands to coordinate as the clay twists beneath and within them, whilst also monitoring the clay’s level of moisture and the speed at which the metal turntable spins, can quickly lead to one slamming a fist against the wheel in frustration. I ended up with nothing but two lumpy pots by the end of my first session, squat pieces that weighed far more than they should considering their size. Th ey still exist somewhere, glazed and hidden away in a box in my mother’s attic.

CENTRING THE CLAY is the fi rst hurdle any pott er throwing on the wheel must overcome. It’s the process of forcing the soft material to be as central on the wheel as it can possibly be, so that it spins perfectly true, like a spinning-top spun so it twirls without any undulations or irregularities in its motion. It’s a process that’s much easier said than done and I certainly struggled at the start, like every beginner does.

As a more experienced potter I now say to others in those early stages not to be too precious. Clay, when it’s soft like this is, is easily recyclable, after all, so it isn’t the end of the world if you ruin a few pots – but at the start you want nothing more than to actually make something. You’ll be damned if you don’t try your hardest to lift away at least one successful pot, even if it is a heavy, poorly formed mess. Th e first few are precious like that and their mishap shapes can be forgiven. A realization quickly makes itself apparent though: your pots will keep getting better and better, so why keep something that’s disastrous when in twenty more attempts you’ll be making something many magnitudes better. This learning curve doesn’t last forever though; it can take years before it begins to plateau but it’ll never really ﬂatten. Rather it tends to take leaps every now and then quite suddenly when a new skill is learnt – that’s how it tends to be for me at least.

One of my first thrown vessels and my hands, photographed for the school’s prospectus. I can still remember the feel of this smooth stoneware clay body.

One of the joys, and downsides perhaps, of learning how to make pottery is that there’s no single way to do things. Every potter throwing on the wheel follows a rough set of steps in order to end up with a pot, but the positions of one’s hands, the tools used, and even the order in which the steps are performed will change drastically from maker to maker. It can seem as if another potter is doing something entirely different from what you’ve been taught, but mostly it isn’t so. It can be infuriating when you’re beginning as you’ll watch countless fi lms of people seemingly doing different things but ending up with more or less the same thrown pot. This means that at the start you’re absorbing a vast array of techniques, if you’re anything like me anyway. I was receiving tuition from my teacher at school before scurrying home and watching as many videos as I could. Eventually, though, something clicks and suddenly parts of the process make sense. Th en you’ll link these successes together until you can throw a well-made vessel.

One of the most pivotal ‘click’ moments that occurred for me was when I saw someone brace their left elbow into their torso, with their forearm and palm outstretched onto the clay, in order to centre it. Instead of using all the strength in your hands and biceps to squeeze the stoneware into the middle of the wheel, you simply lean your upper body weight onto your arm, which forces your arm and your hand to press firmly against the rotating lump. Clay is a soft, squidgy material after all and if what’s pushing into that is mostly the hard bones in your forearm and hand, which are kept steady, then the lump of clay has to conform to it. Once that’s figured out you can practically centre the clay in mere seconds and thereafter you can combine that motion with a process called ‘coning’. When the clay is spinning neatly in the middle of the wheel it can sometimes feel like there’s something not quite right. The mass’s weight might be distributed unevenly, or there could be a few little lumps or bubbles somewhere inside. To remedy this, I push the mass of clay into itself from either side, starting at the bottom and directing it upward into a cone that tapers to

a narrow point at the top. Once it’s spinning up high the clay is carefully compressed back down onto itself until it resembles the puck shape I want.

Coning also affects the clay on a microscopic level, as it causes the particles it’s made up from – platelets – to align. Th ink of clay’s structure like a bag of rice, where all the grains point in different directions from one another. Th e process of coning gradually causes all of these grains of rice, these platelets, to align in the same direction. Suddenly, after two or three cones up and down, the clay begins to feel as if it runs perfectly beneath your hands, without even the tiniest wobble, and it even does what you ask of it more attentively, like a well-trained dog.

With all that said, it’s a process that took me months to get comfortable with and even then, only to a relatively basic level. I remember feeling infuriated when my hands wouldn’t do what I was telling them, but eventually it did click for good, thanks to the patient tuition of Caroline.

Th ere are a few things, though, you should know if you want to make your life easier when centring. Th ese are techniques I’ve been taught or have learnt myself over the past decade. Th e first I’m only putting here for sentimental reasons as it might sound a bit wishy- washy, but it does hold true. One of my future pottery tutors would tell me, ‘In order to centre the clay, you must first centre yourself.’

I’m mostly not one for anything metaphysical, but if you look beyond that this essentially just means that if your mind isn’t in the game at that moment, take a break and try again later. Th ere have been times when I’m attempting to throw a specific shape and I just can’t get it, even years into my practice. I’ll ruin a dozen pots attempting it and I’ll beat myself up over it, when in fact I should just stop, wait, and try again. Th ere have been other particularly tricky forms I’ve had to learn to make, such as one very curvaceous and altered jug, that once thrown is pinched either side of the spout and hoisted backwards. Th is gave it an almost comical lean and made it appear very figurative. Th ey were hell to throw and there were days when after five unsuccessful attempts I’d just

stop, admit defeat, and continue throwing something that I was more familiar with. Th en a few hours later, or even the following day, I’d try again. Th is is what I took from that quote, not sitting and chanting mantras to myself. Another topic that comes up a lot is strength. People watch potters throw and often say, ‘You must be so strong to do that!’, and while this may be true when centring gigantic lumps of clay, it’s all technique when it comes to small and medium amounts. Learning to use your upper body as an anchor is essential. I’ve seen beginners puff their cheeks out, red in the face, as they squeeze all the muscles in their arms and tense their hands and fingers in order to force the clay to comply. While this might work, you’ll end up being exhausted after only a few attempts, compared to simply letting your body bear the brunt of the work by anchoring yourself in a certain way and gently directing the clay into position.

Eventually you’ll get to a point where it doesn’t matter if the clay is slightly off-centre, as you’ll still be able to control its wobbling as you throw. A bubble might cause a minuscule undulation to form in the walls, but you can pop the bubble, compress the rim and move on. Any distortion in the form is exaggerated by the fact that the pot is spinning in place, rotating on a central axis. Once it is off the wheel, trimmed and fired in a kiln, you’ll probably never see it again if it’s only subtle. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try to reach a level where you can centre perfectly, but once you have there comes a certain point when you’re good enough to control the clay and make pots even with some irregularities. To quote the everenlightened Geoff rey, a future teacher of mine, when questioned by pesky students about why the rim of his pot was wobbling slightly: ‘I just don’t give a shit any more.’ Th ere can be beauty in imperfection.

IF I’M HONEST, after my first real attempt at throwing on the wheel, making pots wasn’t something I found myself immediately smitten by. Up until this point in my life I’d been a keen draughtsman, and both fine art

and graphic design were routes I could see myself following. In my mind, a potter never touched a computer; they simply lived in a ramshackle studio out in the countryside, making brown pots and taking them to fairs to sell. At sixteen years old, this was my only real perception of the craft. I just didn’t know it existed in other forms.

Every day, after I arrived home from school, I’d plug myself in and play video games online. My parents had divorced, for better and worse, and I was often down, sometimes lonely and felt isolated in London as my friends were all an hour away, and so I found solace playing video games. My mother still tells me about the times she’d be coming home and from halfway down the street she could hear me inside, shouting commands to my teammates. I’d occupy myself well into the early hours, completing my homework between rounds of search and destroy. My friends online felt as tangible as those in real life, and I still often wonder what they’re doing all these years later. I was overweight, self-conscious and tremendously shy, but at least I still had a very strong group of friends, both in real life and online, which I’m thankful for. I’d have been lost without those people. Th e self-consciousness has never left me and I’m still shy, too, but some things would change.

Up until this time I wasn’t particularly good at anything, and this was brought starkly, and horribly, into reality for me at a joint three-way family birthday party. It was my eighteenth, my great-uncle’s eightieth and my second cousin’s twenty-first. We were all sat in my greatuncle’s garden in Blackheath, and he was giving a speech about the things the three of us had achieved. Th ere was an awful lot to say about the others but for me he said, reading from a piece of paper, almost puzzled as he spoke, ‘And … Florian has the most amazing computer skills!’ Nobody clapped or cheered like they had done for the others. I stared at the ﬂoor, averting my eyes from everyone else’s. All the praises sung about the others and all they could say about me was that? Was that all I was? I spent the rest of the party sulking. I couldn’t bring myself to speak to anyone else and sat in the living room

as the party continued outside. On the way home I asked in the strangely quiet car why he had said that. Surely David didn’t know I spent such a lot of time playing games. Unexpectedly my brother answered, ‘Well, David rang and wanted to know about some nice things to say about you.’

‘And playing computer games is the best thing you could come up with for me?’ I snapped back. ‘Do you have any idea how embarrassing that was?’

Surely he could have thought of something else to tell him, but maybe there wasn’t anything. I was fuming. Why didn’t he speak to my mum? Now fifty people knew I was a video-game obsessed nerd and as we drove home all I could think about was how that had to change. What else could I really do, though? I couldn’t speak another language or play an instrument. I didn’t excel in any other academic subjects. I was overweight and avoided gym classes. I did at least like the sciences and had always loved technical drawing. Art classes, though, were where I felt the most at home and now there was ceramics, and more specifically throwing on the potter’s wheel. Maybe that’s where I belonged, maybe that’s something I could actually do.

Th ere’s a point when learning how to make pots when certain parts of the process click and the better you get, the more you want to do it. It begins to get addictive and you can easily see the progress made. Th e pots I’d thrown the previous week were already outdone by the new ones in front of me. From this point on, after being humiliated in front of my entire family, I spent much more time in the pottery. I was often the only student there, sitting at the wheel throwing rows of pots that slowly, over time, started to become more similar to one another.

I wanted to be able to throw pots that were all identical to one another: that’s what proper potters do, I thought. Mine were roughly akin but if you looked at a line of my mugs, they’d all be a litt le different. Mugs are where I started , throwing endless bodies and scrapping all the outliers. Not only was I in the studio during my lessons, but I’d also spend my lunch breaks potting when my classmates were outside playing football on the

A mass of stoneware clay halfway through being spiral wedged. This removes pockets of air and amalgamates the texture. Next, it’ll be rhythmically folded up, culminating in a conical shape ready to be thrown into a vase.

fi eld next to the workshop. I could hear them through the windows of the studio, yelling and laughing together, yet I was content, learning by myself. I’d do the same after school, as I often had to wait for a lift home back to London. I was always jealous of my friends who could walk back home in minutes, rather than spending their free time in the evenings commuting home. Th ey grew up spending more time playing together and therefore growing up together, having relationships and fights and smoking pot hidden in bushes. Instead, at home I’d watch pottery videos online, hoping to glean some small piece of information about pulling up the walls of clay, or perhaps a new method of centring, or making handles. I also set about teaching myself how to spiral wedge clay, which is the process of folding and pressing the clay in a rhythmic fashion that causes any air pockets to burst as they’re stretched into a spiral that shrinks ever smaller, creating a texture that’s homogeneous and smooth to throw with. Back in the pottery I practised for weeks, trying to mimic the movements I observed in these videos. I’d consistently end up smearing the clay across the wooden workbenches until, finally, a sloppy spiralling shape started to emerge. I was getting there, slowly.

My pots were still heavy, but the weight was feeling more balanced throughout the vessel and they appeared more purposeful too. I threw with a vision of what I wanted to make, rather than letting a pot materialize from a struggle. Th e glazes, however, were patchy, often brown and green and were rather unpleasant, or at least that’s how I see them now.

Th ere was a small side-room that led off from the main workshop that was stacked from ﬂ oor to ceiling with buckets and small sealed tubs of glaze. I’d mix and match all of them – I was infatuated with testing and layering glazes – and ended up with dozens of mostly sepia pots. As with paints, if you mix all the colours together you by and large end up with brown. Maybe that’s what led me to Bernard Leach initially – that and my interest in creating functional pottery. Caroline pointed me

in his direction, informing me that if I really wanted to learn about the recent history of studio pottery, then Leach was the place to start. So, I did and I kept practising.

CENTRING THE CLAY is only the very start of the process when making pots. It’s the setting of the foundations, but you still need to build the rest of the structure above it. Poorly laid foundations can lead to subsidence and the same can be said when throwing pots.

Once the lump of stoneware is spinning perfectly in the middle of the wheel, I begin by plunging my finger and thumb into the thick centre of clay and pressing down to create a well. I don’t press all the way through, as most pots need a base, so you envision, or measure, the thickness in the bottom, which once set is ‘sacrosanct’, as a tutor of mine used to say. To check the depth you can pierce the base with a potter’s needle, pushing it through the clay vertically until the tip hits the wheel.

With enough practice you can begin to judge the difference by sight, which is what I do these days, comparing the depth of the base in the pot with that of the wheel head beside it. After the base thickness has been defined you cannot press any further down, otherwise you might dig all the way through to the metal of the wheel – a mug with a hole in the base isn’t useful for anyone.

After the base has been set you then draw the clay outward, dragging your fi ngers horizontally across the bottom to form what is the internal ﬂoor of whatever type of pot you’re making. Th e first shape any budding potter should become comfortable with is a basic cylinder. Most pots have walls of some kind, and even plates or very shallow dishes have a section that juts upwards around the exterior, so figuring out how to channel the walls up consistently is the next step after centring.

To begin, you pinch at the thick mass of clay that encircles the base you’ve formed, pressing it between the pads of your fingers on the inside and a protruding knuckle on the outside. Make a tight fist with your right hand, fully extend your index fi nger and then

Scrawled notes. I wasn’t mixing my own recipes from scratch at this point, rather I was experimenting by layering dozens of premixed glazes, hoping for the best.

fold it back down at the knuckle, tucking your fingertip so that it’s in line with the base of the same finger. Th at knuckle is then pointed down, an awkward position if you’ve never done it before. Th en, with that knuckle extended, you slide the side of it into the outside of the pot, creating a groove around the base of the vessel. This is then pinched against the pads of your fingers on the inside and together they squeeze the clay and force it upward in one gradual, even motion. Th e thicker mass of clay is carried up, leaving thinner walls below, the crosssection defined by the space left between your digits on the inside and outside.

For the subsequent pulls – normally you gain height with numerous repetitions of this procedure – I once again press a groove in around the base, pushing the excess clay into a usable position, and from the inside I push out a bump just above my knuckle on the outside and once again, together, the fingers pull, or lift if you will, that bulge of clay up. Now, if you thought centring was difficult, then this is much harder, and it’s another one of those processes that many potters do in alternative ways. Some use wetted sponges to move the clay up, others use their fingertips to apply pressure both inside and out. I’ve seen an upturned thumb used and the palm of a hand too. Th e truth is, they are all applicable and they all are perfectly acceptable. You’ve just got to find what feels the most comfortable for you – and initially they’ll probably all feel rather strange. Your hands, arms and shoulders have to be tensed and controlled whilst moving at the same time, maintaining a constant shape with your hands as a slippery wet mass of clay travels through them. It’s a skill you’ll never learn by reading books – you’ve got to get your hands dirty. Th e aim of the game is to pull up the walls evenly, so that the clay is distributed at the same thickness from top to bottom. You don’t want to leave too much clay in the base, otherwise the pot will feel bottom-heavy, a sure sign the piece was made by a beginner. You also don’t want a pot to negatively defy your expectations; for instance, when you go to pick up a jug with a certain

preconception of its weight and it’s much heavier than you expected and you can feel the heft in the base, that isn’t good. Especially if the jug isn’t yet full. You could say the same thing about a vessel that’s as light as a feather when picked up, but it has the opposite connotation. If it’s a handmade pot you marvel at the weightlessness as it demonstrates the skill of the maker.

Together with pulling up the walls of the pot you also need to think about the amount of water you’re using, as the clay must stay lubricated as you throw. Otherwise, it just sticks to your hands, resulting in the vessel twisting or simply collapsing. Wheel-speed is another factor, and beginners tend to either put the pedal to the metal, or go at a deathly slow pace. Ideally, the wheel should spin at different speeds for different processes. Fast for centring, slightly slower for pulling up and shaping the walls, and perhaps slower again for the finishing touches. Yet it varies, of course, from potter to potter and even from wheel to wheel and clay to clay.

Whilst in these early stages of adapting your body to throw pots, your mind is constantly ﬂ ickering between a multitude of things. From how to position your hands, the way you move them in unison, to the speed at which the wheel is spun, and whether you’re using enough water or not. It really is a lot to concentrate on and it can be overwhelming. Ultimately, with enough practice, it all becomes second nature and it does begin to feel intuitive. Muscle memory is a perplexing concept and it’s engrained into the process of throwing. Occasionally nowadays I’ll be making pots and I won’t even realize what my hands are doing and suddenly there’ll be thirty vases all in a row and all I’ve been thinking about was what I’m going to have for dinner.

Back to the task at hand, throwing a cylinder. If you think about thrown pottery, most forms are either cylindrical or bowl shaped. With these two shapes combined in different ways you can create bellied vases with tall necks, which, broken down, are just two bowl shapes stacked rim to rim with a cylinder on top. Th ese two basic shapes are the cornerstones of learning to throw

pots, which is handy, as often when you’re learning to pull cylinders they collapse outward into bowls, so not everything is lost.

Once the clay of the cylinder has been pulled up to an appropriate height and the walls feel even from top to bottom, it can be cleaned up and removed from the wheel. Typically, for my own pots, I scrape away all the excess slip that accumulates on the outside of the vessel with a metal tool that has a sharp, ﬂ at edge. I sponge out the excess water from inside and carefully smooth the rim over with a chamois leather, and fi nally a wire is slid beneath the vessel, separating it from the wheel. It’s lifted away delicately and set to one side, the first step now complete.

A cylinder can become so many things: a jug, a teapot, a storage jar, a vase or an inkwell. Infi nite variations are possible. When making cylinders, you’re constantly struggling against the clay wanting to fight back. Th e quick rotation of the wheel wants the soft material that’s vigorously revolving to gradually splay outward. This means that as you throw narrow vessels you have to continually fight against it, constraining it and preventing it from ﬂying out, whereas when making bowls you’re really just gently coaxing the clay outward, guided by centrifugal force.

I was taught to make these two basic forms by Caroline. She didn’t sit with me constantly and guide me through the process over and over again. Instead she threw an example or two, and then left me to my own devices, which ended up being how all my teachers taught the craft over the coming years. Like riding a bike, after a point you just need to tackle the basics until it makes sense in your mind. For bowls she insisted that it was all about the internal form. As long as that section had a lovely, uninterrupted curve, the outside would follow suit. So, that’s where my focus lay, pushing my curved rubber kidney tool into the walls like a template. Th is same ethos was echoed again later, in college, when a tutor told us that if you were to let a marble drop from the rim of a bowl inward, it should rock back and forth smoothly and come to a natural, graceful stop, perfectly in the centre.

It shouldn’t collide with a ﬂat section on the bottom or an arbitrary undulation that throws it off course.

This advice is exceptionally useful for a beginner and it does instil some good practices, but it’s also the case that once these are mastered the rules can be broken and some of my favourite bowls I use in my kitchen, which I’ve collected from makers around the world, are crooked and intentionally misshapen. Th ey may not be perfect, yet they show wonderfully the character of their makers. Th ey say dogs look like their owners – well, I think the same can be said about pots and the potters who make them. Our attitudes and levels of exactingness are all channelled into these objects our hands create.

Looking back at my early wobbly bowls and sorry excuses for cylinders is like looking back at drawings I did when I was an infant. I only started to throw pots on the wheel when I was sixteen, so to me these early pots correlate in the same way to the scribbles done in my early childhood. Yet they’re different from my kindergarten drawings, as my mind was far more developed at this point in my life. I knew what kind of pots I wanted to create, but my hands just couldn’t manipulate the material expertly enough to see them come to life physically. My child -self drew for the sheer joy of it, without a care for whether the results were any good or not.

There was one exercise for making cylinders that I found tremendously helpful. The task was simple: throw cylinders from two-pound lumps of clay – about 900 grams – as thin and as tall as you can. Even if they break, tearing where the clay thins out too much before buckling and crumbling down, that’s part of the task. I wasn’t trying to create beautiful cylinders. In fact none of these pots would be kept. Rather, it was an exercise to gain an understanding of the material itself, to find its limitations.

I WAS EIGHTEEN and I had become consumed with pottery; I was itching to throw more and learn new skills. I wasn’t good at anything else. In fact, it’s all I had and all I could see myself pursuing. It’s incredible

9781837310289

By My Hands

A Potter’s Apprenticeship

FLORIAN GADSBY

By My Hands

By My Hands

A Potter’s Apprenticeship

Kings Langley Where

I discover clay