Home time

We're heading home today. Thank you so much the wonderful people of the USA.

There's so much to write about, many pictures to show and stories to tell. I'll get them uploaded in the next day or two - we've been so busy living it all that there's been little time to write about it.

We head to the airport shortly and a long, long journey back to England. Ang left for Australia yesterday. We arrive back in London at 7.30 am tomorrow.

Our time here has been amazing, completely mind-blowing. Thank you to all the sweet people we have met on our travels, everybody has made us feel so welcome. It's all quite overwhelming.

Huge, immense, big-time thanks to our fantastic friends and hosts, Hollis and Dee, Dan, Ron and Sarah, thank you, thank you, thank you.

Ang's video from Liberty Town

Thanks Ang

A message from North Carolina

Our great American adventure continues. We're in North Carolina now, sitting in the sunshine outside Ron's house. We didn't have internet access for a few days , so I'm only just getting caught up. Our Virginia experience was fantastic, with many sweet people, who made it a special time. Not least our wonderful host, Dan Finnegan, who looked after us so well. We're missing his company - hopefully he'll be in the UK in the summer and our paths will cross again. Thank you Dan, so much.


Here's Dan during our workshop, after we set him the challenge of making some red clay pots (the properties of the clay are very different from the stoneware body that he is used to throwing). I don't think we converted him.
These are some of the lovely group of people who were at the workshop, a number of whom are bloggers too. I'll put links to their blogs in a later post.
Dan drove us two hours further south east, along the blue ridge mountains of Virginia, to Kevin Crowe's pottery, nestled in the woods at Amherst.

Kevin makes beautiful pots.
Here we met up with Ron and after a tasty chowder, a tour and a pot swap, we said our sad farewells to Dan and headed onwards to a warm welcome at Meredith Heywood's home and pottery in Whynot, North Carolina, where a group of local potters were gathered for a social evening. It was another great pleasure to meet an old friend of blog and Facebook.



This is Meredith and her husband Mark. We stayed overnight, Ang and Hannah stayed with Meredith, Ron and myself with Ron's friend, potter and pizza maker, Tom Gray.

The next day, we were joined by blogger Tracey Broom(next to Ron) - it was a delight to meet her. This tour is full of wonderful surprises, meeting people for real, that we have communicated with for years in the virtual world through blog or Facebook - some people call it all a waste of time, but I think it's amazing that the internet creates the opportunity to meet so easily with like-minded people.

Tracey and Meredith took us on a tour of some of the many potters in North Carolina. There are hundreds, rows and rows of pottery shops, lining the roads. It was a great day. I'll post pictures later - I need to sleep now, as tomorrow morning we will be presenting our final workshop in Shelby, North Carolina. This blog post has taken several days to finish as we've been pretty busy - it started three days ago in the sunshine and now it's the middle of the night.
This is tomorrow's venue. We're nervous again tonight, it'll be good to get underway in the morning.




This poster made me laugh! I'm sorry to be missing it(click on the image to enlarge)

Goodnight all

A quick note from Virginia

Hello there!!!!!

Well we made it to the States safe and well and we're having a wonderful time with fantastic, kind people.

It's been busy, busy, so I've had little time to blog and where we're staying now in Virginia has no internet, but I'll be sharing lots of pictures with you all in the forthcoming week or two. Here's

Our Cape Cod workshop went really well, in spite of our stressing and worrying. Hollis and Dee looked after us so well - they're lovely folks. we gave Hollis nightmares, literally, with all our flapping and worrying. I have some great pots that Hollis made that I'll share with you later.

You can read all about our adventures on Hollis's blog here

Here's Hannah's perspective on the events right here

We're staying in a beautiful farmhouse in Virginia for the next few days with Dan. Here's what he's saying right here

And here's a video that Ang made of the workshop at Cape Cod. You can see what Ang has to say right here

There's so much to tell, but I have to go now and prepare clay for tomorrow's workshop. We're showing short films about our lives this evening at the opening reception, so we're a little anxious right now. It'll be fine once we get going.



Our lovely hosts, Hollis and Dee
Hannah taking a paddle in Hollis and Dee's local 'pond'
The fantastic Cape Cod Potters

Hannah doing her thing
A picnic in Washington DC yesterday
The beautiful house where we're staying
Guy Wolff, who we visited on our way from Cape Cod to Virginia. It was great to meet him

Eeeeek! This is serious! I'd better go and pug that clay, bye for now, have a nice day y'all

Here we come

Today London England...........................

tomorrow Boston USA!

On my way to the USofA

Life has been crazy lately, hence my lack of blogging, with lots of very late nights and early mornings, trying to get everything done.

I'm sitting here waiting to be collected by my good friend Nic Collins. We head off this afternoon to Uppingham and the Goldmark Gallery, where Nic's exhibition opens tomorrow. It was a great privelige for me to be asked to write the essay for the catalogue, if you'd like to have look, click here. I saw the pots before they were dispatched, they're amazing.

My friend and fellow potter Paul Young wrote this of Nic in an email to me this morning, 'Nic is probably the finest potter of his generation, his work carries a strength and confidence far beyond the parameters of anything being made today.' He's absolutely right about that. I'll be meeting Paul there, it'll good to see him.

Here's an extract from the film that has been made to accompany the event.

From Uppingham, my journey continues, via my parents', to London, where I'll meet up with Hannah, then Heathrow and on to the USA. My bags are packed and I'm filled with excitement and trepidation. For a long time I've been putting it to the back of my mind. I spend my days alone in a shed in the middle of nowhere, so the prospect of being in front of a room full of people, doing what I do, is pretty scary.

I'm going to try and get back in the blogging groove and I'll share the journey. I've never been away from my family for a month before, it's going to be very strange, but thankfully the internet will help us to speak to each other, albeit virtually.

If you follow this link, you'll be able to see pictures of some of the stuff that's been happening in recent days. Check out the amazing sgrafitto harvest jug, decorated by the super talented, Andrew 'Frank' Grundon.

I have a couple of exhibitions in the UK while I'm away,

Slip at the Ruthin Craft Centre, 2nd April - 12th June

Artists of the South West, Long Room Gallery, Winchcombe, Gloucs, 9th - 17th April

Well I'm off to check that my passport is in my bag. I'll post some pictures from Nic's show soon.

Bye for now

An appeal message from The Leach Pottery, St Ives

The trustees and staff of the Leach Pottery would like to express our great sadness at the recent catastrophe that has beset Japan. The Leach Pottery’s historic and current links to Japan, dating back over a century, are of great importance to us and the friendship we have received from the Japanese people over the years has been unwavering. We have not forgotten the support we received from the people of Mashiko pottery village and members of the Mingei Association in 2008 when individuals collectively donated over £40,000 towards rebuilding our pottery in St Ives and we would like to offer them back the hand of friendship now.

We are launching an appeal to raise funds for Mashiko which has been badly hit by the earthquake. Mashiko has over 400 studios and kilns, providing the main livelihood of the village, and the recent quake has caused considerable damage to both kilns and buildings. Mashiko’s two main museums, the Mashiko Ceramics Museum and the Hamada Reference Museum have also been badly hit.

Mashiko Town in Tochigi prefecture is located about 60 miles north of Tokyo. In 1923 Shoji Hamada, co-founder of the Leach Pottery in St Ives with Bernard Leach, returned to Japan following the Tokyo earthquake of 1923. He settled in Mashiko with his family where he set up his own pottery, now owned and run by his potter grandson Tomoo Hamada, who attended the reopening of the Leach Pottery following its restoration in March 2008. Shoji Hamada also established the Hamada Reference Museum in Mashiko to display his stunning and internationally acclaimed collection of crafts and ceramics.

MASHIKO EARTHQUAKE APPEAL

You can donate to the Leach Pottery’s Mashiko Earthquake Appeal in any of the following ways:
By phone – call with you credit or debit card details on 01736 799703

By post – send a cheque to the Bernard Leach (St Ives) Trust Ltd. (marking the back of the cheque ‘Mashiko Appeal’. Send to Mashiko Earthquake Appeal, The Leach Pottery, Higher Stennack, St Ives, Cornwall TR26 2HE

By internet – donate through your Paypal account julia@leachpottery.com – please add a note clearly stating ‘Mashiko Earthquake Appeal’

If you are a UK taxpayer you can Gift Aid your donation by including the following information: Your name, address and postcode and confirmation that you wish the Leach Pottery to treat your donation as a Gift Aid donation. This simple act will allow us to claim a further 25p for each £1 donated towards the appeal.

Films and pictures

Well it's been a long time since a blog post, so here is a whole big lump of stuff all in one big one.

I went to my friend Jonny Thompson's photographic studio last week to have some shots taken of the pots from the recent firing. He's a very good photographer - he's taken my pictures for me for years, so if you need some great images and you're near enough to Exeter, you can get in touch with him via his web site here . This is a short film of him in action.



And here are some of the shots

Here's a little film I made a while ago of the pot beneath, being decorated.

These pots are all going to The Long Room Gallery in Winchcombe, for an exhibition in April. I'll post more about that soon.

I've been making these large press moulded dishes in recent days.

Crazy chickens

This one has yet to be placed over the mould.

Well that's all for now.

The news of Japan is so sad, I'll be posting soon about some fund raising events, so please be sure to check back.

Film of the kiln unpacking

A proud dad moment

My little baby Luke, born 1st March 1993...................


Now a young man.

Happy 18th birthday Luke

A few pots

Well it's taking ages for the video to upload, so here are a few stills. My photography skills don't really do the glazes justice.






Video to follow

Glazed

A film of the unpack to follow, in the meantime, here are some pictures from last week. This is me brushing glaze on to a baluster jug.
Mugs and jars awaiting glazing
A picnic in the field
The front of the kiln pack.

Back soon

New pots in the morning

Lots to tell, but it's late, so for now, here's a bit of film of Hannah and Alex's visit and the firing at the weekend.

New pots in the morning, fingers crossed!

Walk to work

Blog post!

Hi there. I've been very bad at updating this blog recently, I apologise for that. Here's what's been happening.

I have some orders for a number of very large pots, so in recent days I've been learning a bit more about coil-throwing. It's a tricky technique, which I've done before, but never really mastered. I made a few big pots last week, but I'm still not happy with the shapes they've been turning out, so they've been scrapped and put back through the pug mill. The picture shows one in the making. This one went to about 2ft 6, before I scrapped it. By the time I made the last one, I felt I'd got much better at joining the coils and hiding the join, but the shape was still a bit unresolved - I need to do much more drawing, so that I'm aware of how I want the form to develop. Nevertheless, I made good progress and I'm confident that I'll get it right soon with a bit more practice. There are some important exhibitions coming up this year, so it'll be great to have some whoppers made for those.

I was helped greatly by this fantastic new book, which has been written by my good friend Nic Collins. I went to stay with Nic last week and left with a copy and the customary hangover.

It's a really good book, with lots of step-by-step photographs, showing various different ways of making larger pots - here's Nic doing his thing...

...and here's some other dodgy bloke throwing a jug. A really good 'how-to-do' guide, you can get it right here.

This pot was a bit of a weird shape, but I thought I'd see it through the process, just so that I could work out how to slip, decorate, glaze and raw fire such an object. As it turned out, I dropped it this afternoon when I was trying to slip it, so it wasn't to be.

One of the reasons for going to visit Nic was so we could have a talk about an essay that he's asked me to write, for the catalogue of his solo show at the Goldmark Gallery, which opens on 2nd April. It's a great honour to be writing such a thing for a prestigious exhibition. I got a sneak preview of the work that Nic's amassed for the show, saved from firings over the last two years - it's going to be a stunning exhibition, really spectacular. I'm supposed to be writing the essay right now, but blogging is long overdue so I thought I should do a bit of this first.
This is other stuff from the last week or so. An 8lb sprigged jug
Some baluster jugs. These are more slender than usual - they're such an anthropomorphic shape, maybe my recent Dame experience has made me consider more feminine curves :)
1lb jars.
Some jugs with applied decoration. The pot in the middle has a peculiar beak through which to pour. It's a funny looking thing, based upon one of the medieval jugs in York Museum. I dug up a rim shard from one of these in my garden a few years ago, with the pouring hole and a bit of the beak, so I was able to work out exactly how the beaks were joined.
Another baluster, black slip over white.

On Friday my old chum Andrew Grundon(aka Frank), signwriter, carver, writer and illustrator came to visit. He's an exceptional artist and with absolute ease and confidence, drew this sgrafitto design on to one of my little jugs for his daughter, Freya.

This pot will go into my wood firing, which happens on Saturday - woohoo!!

Alex and Hannah are coming down on Tuesday for the week, to help with the pack and the firing. It'll be great to see them and it'll give Hannah and me the opportunity to knock about a few ideas for things that we might include in our forthcoming workshops in the USA. I'm looking forward to new pots, warm from the kiln, this time next week - hurrah.

Well that's all for now, I've made a few videos in recent times, so I'll post some of those later. If you'd like to see more pictures of what's been happening this month, follow this link here

Happy Monday everybody, back soon

Goodnight