Doug Fitch

Scratching The Surface

| hannah

What a month, the passing of Her Majesty the Queen, a new Prime Minister, and for us, a second dose of Covid. It was a sad day when the Queen died. I, like so many, had a sense that she was immortal as she’s been here longer than most of us have. I think for some of us who have known grief in recent times, it unlocked feelings that we have tried to suppress. It was about more than just the Queen passing, and it touched us deeply.

Yesterday we took the road over to Edinburgh for the evening, to the opening of a new exhibition, Scratching the Surface, at The Scottish Gallery on Dundas Street. The Scottish Gallery is renown for it’s exhibitions of both contemporary and historical fine and applied arts. If you have a look at the website and the pages about the exhibition you can read about the other exhibitors and watch a number of small films about the works and of course browse the pieces themselves. There is a beautiful catalogue available from the gallery for the exhibition.

There was a lovely review of the exhibition in The Scotsman newspaper’s Arts Review earlier this week and it singled out Hannah for praise. I quote, ‘But perhaps the star in this second part is Hannah McAndrew’s slipware. She gives real authenticity to her revival of this ancient style of pottery decoration.’

The exhibition is on until October 29th, opening details are on the Scottish Gallery website.

Welcome!

| hannah

Welcome to our new website.

Here we are on the blog page, where we’ll keep you up to date with what’s going on in our lives.

Under normal circumstances we’d be panicking by now, trying to get the last few pots through the kiln, ready to head off to the Earth & Fire show in Nottinghamshire. But of course, these are not normal circumstances. Instead, we’ve been trying to get on top of all the things that we never usually have the time to do. Just at the moment, we’re sorting out the workshop so that it functions properly, which up until now, it never has.

We moved production home to a workshop in the garden of our Galloway home about three years ago, starting off with two portable cabins, which have, step by step, been roofed and enclosed within wooden buildings, as and when time and money allowed.

This year, the lockdown has provided plenty of time and fortunately sales have continued to happen, so we’ve been wielding paintbrushes and employing a local handyman, to tidy up and streamline our operation.

The blue cabin on the left contains our electric kilns and wood machines. It’s to get a coat of green paint in the forthcoming days, once it stops raining. Only the one wall at the front of the workshop has been painted yet, so there’s a lot to do.

The painting will have to fit in around the next stage, which is to build a large wood fuelled kiln. We intend to start the build in the next week or two. The open-sided kiln shed at the back of the workshop and is ready and waiting.

We need to start getting some pots on the shelves, so as soon as we do, we’ll put some pictures and short videos of them in production, right here.

If you’d like to subscribe to our YouTube channel or sign up to our newsletter, please do. When we’re in full production, we post films every two or three days, and I promise we’ll not overload you with newsletters.

Here’s a little film narrated by our daughter Pippin, imploring you to subscribe to our channel, so that she can earn jelly babies!

Thank you for checking in on us, please do drop by again soon to see how we’re getting on.

Tradition – East & West, The Movie

| hannah

The Stratford Gallery have made this lovely film of the exhibition ‘Tradition – East & West’ laid out in the gallery as if it were opening to the public. It’s wonderful for us to see it like this as we were very disappointed to not be able to attend a public opening. As we said previously we are thrilled to be exhibiting with the highly renown potter from Mashiko, Japan, Tomoo Hamada, quite an honour. The pots that have already been purchased, thank you to all who have done so, we are amazed at the response, should be winging their way across the world right now.