Hello and welcome to my monthly diary. This is the first time that I’ve posted my diary on here, after seven and a half years of writing every month for Clay Craft Magazine, and Craft & Design Magazine before that. Thank you to those who have subscribed to receive updates.
Suddenly there’s no print deadline, and no frustrated editor chasing me up for my copy, so I’m going to need to find some self-motivation – eek!
Well, it’s certainly been an eventful month, in both our home and our work lives.
We are just beginning our fifth week of sleeping in the camping shed in the garden. We spend much of the summer camping in there, as it’s a big adventure for Pippin and Fred. It’s a warm and comfortable place to stay, as it’s fully insulated, we have a sofa bed, and the kiddies have bunks. We love it in there. This current stint isn’t a holiday time adventure though, it’s due to building work in the house.
We applied for a grant from the Scottish Government, to fit an air source heat pump and solar panels. The outside facing wall of each room has had studwork applied and is then insulated with a four-inch-thick coat of sheep’s wool, before being covered with plasterboard, and then skimmed. Each room has had replacement radiators, with new pipework running throughout.
As you might imagine, it’s been incredibly disruptive and very, very messy. Plaster gets everywhere. The furniture in each room is piled up beneath dust sheets, and our extensive pottery collection and library is packed away in a stack of more than fifty banana boxes in the showroom.
I’m not complaining, we’re so fortunate to be getting this work done, it’s certainly something we wouldn’t be able to afford without the grant and we’re very lucky to have a shed into which we can retreat. We’ve just had to keep focussed on the end game, try not to get too stressed about the mess, and remind ourselves of the fact that it will make our house not just more comfortable and more energy efficient, but also greener.
It is a small discomfort and inconvenience to us when compared to the plight of many of our pottery friends in North Carolina, who are currently suffering the results of terrible destruction and devastation following Hurricane Helene. For some of them. it’s a question as to whether they will ever be able to rebuild their homes and workplaces after this terrible disaster. Our thoughts are very much with them, and we send our love to them at this awful time.
Although relatively insignificant, the chaos here has made finding any consistent rhythm to our work difficult, and throw into the mix, two consecutive weeks of molar extractions at the dentist, it’s all left me feeling exhausted. I need to find a burst of energy from somewhere, as we have so many deadlines on the horizon.
Hannah has just completed an order of mugs which are prizes for a local duathlon called Dalbeattie Hardrock Challenge. It’s a big job, with each mug requiring the event’s title and a stickman bicycle and runner on each. She is an extraordinary maker, there aren’t many folks who have her skills, I surely don’t.
We have just sent pots to Japan for an exhibition of British slipware, with Gallery St Ives. We sent mostly small stuff, little jugs, mugs, yunomi, lidded jars and press moulded dishes, but even though the scale is small, it still takes a long time to make.
We’re currently working on an order for Dumfries House, a stately home in Ayrshire, consisting of my lidded jars and mugs, and Hannah’s bowls and small jugs.
There are pots needed for an exhibition at Clay College in Stoke entitled, Expressive Earthenware: The Maker’s Mark, 2nd November – 31st December, and for the Christmas Show at Contemporary Ceramics in London.
Furthermore, our Ninth Annual Online Exhibition opens on 25th October, so we’re in full-on panic mode.
We haven’t quite got our programmer set right on our new kiln. Our glaze is quite unforgiving, just a little too hot, and it starts to shiver, with slithers of glaze popping off handles, rims and raised areas of decoration, and that’s what happened in our last glaze firing, which has put us further behind. To remedy this, we need to adjust the programmer, so we’re putting pyrometric cones into all our kilns to give us some comparable data, then we’ll adjust the new kiln controller accordingly. We dare not risk losing an entire kiln load of glazed pots in the new kiln, so I’ve made a batch of ten-pound flowerpots to fill most of it. I must say, I really enjoyed making them, and it took me back to when I worked for a flowerpot manufacturer in the mid-eighties when I left college. I love gardening and find it most satisfying, growing things in our own flowerpots, so I’m looking forward to filling these with spring bulbs.
We received the most most exciting news this month. Three years since the initial proposal was suggested by some friends to the Head Curator, we have both had a pot purchased for the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. We still can’t believe that it’s true, but it is, and we personally delivered them a couple of weeks ago.
Some good friends had offered to fund the purchase of the pieces for the Museum, and Alun Graves, the Head Curator, set about the acquisitions process. It isn’t straightforward, and I don’t know the full details of the process, but I think a proposal must be submitted by the Curator, and it is then scrutinised by a least two committees whose remit is to decide if it would be a worthwhile purchase for the collection. When we received the email confirmation, we were so overwhelmed, that we were virtually unable to speak.
Over the years, Hannah and I have spent many hours in the V&A, which houses some of the pots that have been the most influential pots of our careers. When I had just started to study ceramics at college, we visited the V&A and one post-medieval pot rekindled memories of being in the school archaeological society when I was eleven.
The inspiration taken from such pots have shaped my career ever since. We always go and say hello to that pot, and a beautiful tapered medieval jug, made in Mill Green, Essex.
We never would have imagined that ours would end up in the same collection.
We took the pieces to London by train. It was an early start to the day, so Grandad put the kiddies on the school bus for us. On arriving in Carlisle for our first change, we heard the announcement that our train had been cancelled, which was extremely frustrating, but par for the course. Another train eventually came, and we arrived in London, an hour late for our meeting with the curatorial team. They were understanding of the situation, but our meeting was brief as they had other commitments that afternoon.
We unwrapped the pots. Head Curator Alun Graves and Assistant Curator, Kate Devine, pulled on protective gloves. As I lifted the jug from its packaging, Alun Graves informed me that that would be the last time it would ever be held by its handle, or touched with bare flesh, which was a very strange thought, and brought it home that the pots will be there forever.
We were shown where the pot acquisitions will be entered in a handwritten ledger. The shelves were full of these beautifully bound old books, that have recorded the acquisition of every pot since the Museum was founded. I hope we can get a photograph of that when it’s completed. Alun then took us back through the behind-the-scenes corridors, and into the ceramics galleries, where we sat quietly on a bench, surrounded by the most extraordinary pottery, overwhelmed, and shed a few tears of relief, happiness, and other emotions I don’t have words for. Then we hopped on the train, for a return journey as poor as the earlier one, and eventually made it home in the early hours, to our shed in the Galloway countryside.
Here are Pippin and Fred with the pots, before we packed them to take to London. One day they’ll be able to take their grandchildren to see them.
The pieces are going straight into a show entitled British Studio Pottery and the V&A. Hannah and I have been invited to the private view at the end of the month, which we’re hoping to get to. I think that once we see them in their cabinets, it will finally seem real.
I hope they don’t put our pieces too far apart from each other, I don’t think they’ll cope!
