It’s ten years since I first picked up the clay and I have learned that to be a potter you definitely need a few key personality traits! The first of these is patience or, at the very least, an ability to slow right down and let things flow. It is sometimes extremely difficult but if we rush something we may well lose it. In the studio there are often cries of frustration as we go through the bottoms of our perfect pieces because we couldn’t resist that last teensy weensy trim, or we are just about finished and a crack appears out of seemingly nowhere and we know the piece is done for because you can’t fix a crack on a half-dry piece.
And that leads on to the importance of letting go - once a piece has a fatal wound the best thing you can do is reclaim the clay, move on immediately and start again. It’s not easy when you have worked on it for days and grown to love it.
Glazing is equally fraught. This is why we all pray to the kiln gods, and with good reason. It took me months to get the lustre to work in the kiln. I had no idea what I was doing and, like an oven, every kiln is subtly different. I followed the instructions on the lustre bottle to the letter and watched copious You Tube videos, but I could not get it right. I used to open the lid of the kiln to discover cloudy blobs all over the pieces, black or pink areas and sections where it looked like I hadn’t applied lustre at all. It was a complete mystery to me. Was the temperature too high, too low, were there too many pieces in there? Should the bung be in or out? I had no idea. All I could do was keep on trying different temperatures, ramps and soaks (don’t ask!). And hoping.
On the day it worked for the first time I had woken up at about 5. By now I was used to clay being the first thing on my mind. It was a freezing December morning, and I put my coat on over my pyjamas and went outside to the garage where I kept my kiln. I’ll never forget the feeling of stunned shock and amazement when I lifted the lid to see a perfect piece of lustred porcelain lying in the middle of the kiln shelf. Outside it was still dark, but the lustre had worked and it was like a glorious sunrise all on its own. It was the beginning of something so special and important in my life.
And here it is pictured above - my first ever piece of successful lustre.