This blog is a collection of writings and experiments relating to an Arts Council DYCP fund to explore unprocessed clay in my work. Ill be looking at landscape in regions of the UK known for their clay deposits, mainly the Thames estuary, Dorset and Staffordshire where I will also be extracting clay for my own purposes. I’ll be looking at ancient ceramics and glazes as well as contemporary work in this field.
My use of clay started as a tactile counter to more rigid conceptual work. Starting with recreations of everyday disposable objects, I used clay in a playful and cathartic manner. I gradually developed a rudimentary process for a container or vessel. The process involved pinching seams into the clay, much like a tailor uses darts to shape clothes. The resulting pots work with and accentuate the squashiness of clay rather than the regularity of more refined ceramics.
My interests include archaelogogical and hisorical ceramicts to contemporary industrial ceramics; all starting with the same, to a degree, silts sands and clays deposited during various geological epochs. I am as interested in the bathroom suite in gleaming white, factory produced in their millions, as I am contemporary ceramic art.
This project started in summer 2021 I think, on a trip to Brownsea Island in Pool Harbour. Brownsea the site of a former clayworks. It has an interesting history, later the island was turned into a nature reserve. It only has access by ferry and there are no cars on the island. it takes about 3 hours to walk around it, though part of the shore is inaccessible. It is also the home of the Scout movement. The Scouts still use the campground on the western point of the island but the public have been given access for a few years now. That camp ground is on the site of the clay works, more or less, whereas the lakes which are former clay pits on the north of the island, are now part of the wildlife reserve managed by Dorset Wildlife Trust. The clay works were connected to Pottery Pier by a tramway which was turned into the footpath. The beach at that point is made up of fragments of broken pottery, mainly teracotta sanitary ware. In the woods around there are some ruins of old kilns, as well as one on the shore.
The low cliffs are made of a dark grey clay which due to the seawater is soft enough to work. On that visit I made a quick pinchpot in the morning sun. It was quite beautiful as a one person workshop, barefoot potting I could call it. Once home I fired it to about 1150 and it came out a bold orange colour, the same clay if a nice pale buff when fired to 1230 and grey 1250.
Folkestone Clay – Gault – high Bentonite/Smectite. great glaze
