Everyone is an artist
This summer I returned to Turning Earth after a long sabbatical spent looking after young children and reconnecting with my own artistic practice. My co-workers have been asking me about the founding vision of our studios. I’ve been thinking about it a lot.
I woke up this morning, on the Autumn equinox, also known astrologically as ‘The Cusp of Beauty’, with this sentence ringing in my mind: “Everyone is an artist.”
Turning Earth runs ceramic studios where people can come and make ceramics, but our core purpose is really to create a broad adult curriculum — a way of reclaiming creativity, making and beauty as ordinary parts of adult life.
When children are growing up, we consider them to be rounded people who should try everything. We teach them English, Maths, Science. We give them paint and crayons and drive them to music classes. We make them do PE. We take them to football practice. We recognise that they are, each one of them, multifaceted.
Then, as adults, in the highly specialised economy we’ve inherited, we easily become stuck in a very inhuman division of labour. We become accountants, lawyers, programmers, and spend most of our time — and build our identities — around a single area of expertise.
I think there’s something quite strange about that.
Pottery is interesting in this context because it has also become much more specialised than it once was.
Only a few hundred years ago in these islands, pottery would have been practised much more widely. Not by everybody, but there would have been potters in every corner of the land, working in small cottage industries. Everything they made was relatively low-fired, and the clay could generally be sourced locally.
The kind of stoneware we use today has a much more complex history. In China, ceramics developed into a highly specialised industrial process very early on. Over a thousand years ago, Chinese potteries had developed forms of division of labour that allowed them to produce ware on a large scale and with extraordinary complexity. They had very sophisticated glazes and firing processes.
That history gave us the high-fired stonewares and glazes we now think of in the UK as the studio standard. But the sophistication of these processes, while making the ware more varied and beautiful, and more durable, also makes the process much less accessible. You couldn’t simply dig clay up from around where you live and make that kind of pottery. You need specialised materials, specialised knowledge and specialised equipment.
So what we’re doing at Turning Earth is taking something that has become incredibly complicated and global and making it local and accessible and possible again.
And I think that matters, because to be human is to be artistic, and pottery is our oldest practical art form.
But for me personally, this isn’t just about pottery. It’s broader than that. It’s about who gets to make things at all, who art belongs to, and what it is to have a personal relationship with beauty.
For me, attending a community pottery when I lived in Northern California was life-changing. I sat down at a wheel and discovered that I could make my own bowls and plates, and made my rented kitchen come alive with something indescribably my own. It was incredibly empowering. In bringing into physical existence a vision that had previously lived only in my mind, the way I experienced my relationship with the world changed, and ultimately this led me to becoming an entrepreneur.
One person might be a potter in their heart of hearts; another might express themselves through poetry, which is more my own medium these days. Someone else might enjoy making their environment beautiful with well-designed practical items, like the Turning Earth technicians who carefully welded in metal the tables in our Highgate studio.
The main thing is that I believe everyone has creativity and a love of beauty buried in them in one form or another. The more access we have to that part of ourselves, the more vibrant we are, and the more human we are. When we are creative, we can innovate, change and adapt to the world around us with the inspiration and freedom we once possessed as children. We are agents in reality rather than passive consumers. Collectively, this is meaningful: the more creative we are the more capable we are of engaging with the challenges life throws at us, including the big issues of our time.
For me, it is also a spiritual concern: I believe that the more we experience ourselves as makers and creators, the less subject we are to the conditioning we inherit, and the closer we can draw to the truth of what we are.
And I think there’s something about beauty in that too. Culturally, we’ve made beauty something to be produced by specialists for everybody else to consume. I think we need to reclaim beauty as a human value — not simply something to look at, but something we can participate in making.
Beauty is to be found in the handmade, just as our forebears in the Arts and Crafts movement proclaimed. But it is also to be found in the process of making itself, and the sensitivity it creates in the maker; a way of seeing, a part of being human.
That’s also why what we’re doing isn't really about producing professional potters. I’m not interested in an inherited market logic that reduces people to economic units — to what we are able to sell.
Some of our members will become professional potters. Some people will sell their work at markets, simply for fun. Most people will make only for themselves and their friends. That’s as it should be.
Our users are varied. They might be burned-out executives who need something else in their lives, graphic designers who spend their days transmitting visual ideas through screens and who miss using their hands, mothers who need time for themselves. Our students might have never lost their connection to the creativity they had as a child, or have since built an image of themselves as “not good at that kind of thing.”
Whoever you are, making things with other people, making things for yourself and giving them to your friends, can bring a surprising amount of satisfaction.
Our hands evolved, from our earliest origins, in relationship with clay: moulding it into pots we could use. There is something deeply human about allowing the physicality of experience to take over. Clay itself is the product of an immense geological and biological history: the weathered residue of slaked rock, transformed through interaction with the biological world over millennia into a highly plastic, infinitely versatile medium of expression.
I believe it is that physicality, that long evolution in symbiosis with the natural world, which ultimately distinguishes the human from the technologies and artificial intelligences we have created.
And so that’s what I think Turning Earth is about, finally: giving people the opportunity to make things, to discover that they can do it, and to reconnect with the part of themselves that is not just creative, but a creator.
In this fast-changing, untethered era of history, I want to make that experience happen on a broad enough scale to influence our culture. I believe widespread access to making can help us get into deeper relationship with the material world around us, to find new ways to be drawn into community, and to remain centred in our humanity.
Tallie, Founder, Turning Earth
We give children a broad curriculum but expect adults to specialise. What do we lose when creativity, making and beauty are separated from ordinary adult life?
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