Blog

The pottery studio at Stanford university.

This picture was the background image on my computer for 5 years.

People often ask about the story behind Turning Earth. It happened again today so I thought that this time I'd share my answer with you.

I grew up around ceramics. My mother is a self-taught potter, a jack-of-all-trades kind of an artist who dabbles in everything. We had a wheel in our sitting room and a kiln in our conservatory. However, I wasn't all that interested. I associated clay with 'pottery class', the course my mum taught for children using the studio in the local comprehensive on a Saturday morning, which meant I had to get out of bed early at the weekend and so felt like drudgery.

Then, after working hard at university thinking I wanted to be a poet, and then an academic, I found myself in the corporate world as a sustainability consultant. I was bored out of my mind and disillusioned. I decided to take a course in pottery at Hackney Community College, because I wanted to do something more directly creative. I picked up the clay and got on the wheel and I had one of those memorable, life-changing moments of clarity. I felt like I'd been alive for a thousand years, as if I had been throwing pots for lifetime after lifetime. It was the first of many visionary experiences I've had in a ceramics studio.

Soon after, I quit the job and moved to California and briefly married an unknown novelist who couldn't get published. We had a romantic summer while he was retraining in journalism at Stanford University. They had an open-access pottery studio for all their students - and it wasn't even used by the art department. People who were studying as engineers, who have since been snapped up by Google, mathematicians, very mentally creative people, all used the studio as a way to create balance in their lives. Their level of skill was amazing - in my opinion, it wasn't paralleled by people coming out of masters courses in the UK. And this was just a hobby.

Part of me wanted to be a potter, but I had another big part of my personality that wanted to do something organisational. I didn't want to have to choose. I felt angry that the UK seemed to offer only two choices - either do evening classes and dabble but don't really get into it, or quit your job and do a three-year degree. It seemed to me (and still does) that I didn't want to either be an artist or not be one. I didn't want to choose; I wanted to do both. I wanted a hobby studio that was good enough that I could turn pro if I wanted to.

One day, on the Stanford Campus, throwing a set of plates on the shores of a dried up lake, under the California sun and surrounded by agapanthus and hummingbirds, I had the idea for Turning Earth. It came out of my own moment of perfect happiness.

I then went on a tour of the US, working as a theatre manager, and was able to try out ten different studios in five different States. I studied each of them and stored up the best elements for Turning Earth. One in particular, Mudfire in Atlanta, Georgia, gave us the membership model that makes everything work.

Long story short, the novelist became a New York Times bestseller, and I - inspired - moved back to the UK and started looking for a place to set up. It took about a year. I started reaching out to other people who wanted the place to exist as much as I did and built a community around it. We crowdfunded the studio and sold places in advance. And now there are hundreds of people that use the studio every week, many of whom graduate to becoming full-time professionals without having to take the college route. Many others just use the place for therapy.

Since we opened, the vision of what is possible at Turning Earth has continued to grow. It feels as if we are still at the beginning.

--Tallie

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It was one busy week. So busy in fact that it took us a week to recover and report back. We've taken a selection of pictures from it, so you can take a look for yourselves. Over Saturday and Sunday the 5th and the 6th December we had the most jam-packed Winter Sale ever, and sold over 1000 pots. The proceeds all go to support early-career ceramicists in establishing their businesses. In addition, we raised over £1700 for medical emergency supplies for one of our students, nurse Hannah Goodwin, to take to Calais to help refugees set up a medical centre.

We were also part of Hey Clay, the initiative by the Craft Council and the BBC's Get Creative to get more people getting their hands in clay. We ran free taster sessions with our resident artist Ben Sutton throughout Friday the 4th.

Tallie spent Friday 4th at the Treasury meeting George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and other small business owners, as Turning Earth has been chosen as one of the Small Business 100 - a group of businesses that represent the diversity and innovation in the sector. She learned that small business makes up 60% of the UK private economy. This means that a well-organised small business and co-work movement should be able to influence policy to support more sustainable, decentralised industry, which is what Turning Earth is all about. Together, small businesses dwarf the multinational corporations that the likes of Osborne meet every day and we hope to see them gaining more influence. Organising under the banner of Small Business Saturday seems like a good first step.

For now, we will wish you a Happy Christmas, take a breather, and come back refreshed in the New Year. Our next studio sale will be held on Easter Saturday, 26th March 2016.

Image: Sabrina Dallot-Seguro

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Image copyright BBC Great Pottery Throwdown

So it went out with a bang, or more accurately, like a polite British farewell after a village summer fete. There was something very reassuring and reasonable about the final episode of The Great Pottery Throw Down. Arguably, the best man won; no fireworks, no lap of glory no more tears even. Just no cracks in the handles or bottoms.

It was the last montage of where they are now which was most relevant to us in the end, as the life changing (sort of) drama unfolded from week to week, we saw how it shaped and changed the contestants, how they improved and developed and then we were given the snippets of the impact it had had on them after it was over. Somehow that last part brought something home to us too. How we had changed as a collective, as a studio. It wasn’t so much the excitement from copying the challenges or learning new things. But how we’d grown physically and inexorably, the studio membership and interest in it has soared and peaked as the show progressed, generating a growing waiting list. We’ve had to find creative ways to accommodate and schedule courses without starting riots. It’s not bragging, it’s the nation waking up to possibilities and Turning Earth, currently, is right in the frontline: BBC’s Throwdown it seems, has changed our lives too.

New pressures on established systems due to maximum capacity membership have forced us to adapt to new ways of running a studio. It used to be an irritation when a kiln mis-fired, now it’s an emergency. We’ve had to arrange extra shelving, a new kiln, more wheels, more hands on deck. That frantic energy to win challenges in the show has segued its way into our work life. The difference is, we don’t get to switch off.

So, well-potted Matthew, a close tie with Tom perhaps but quality shone through. We’ve enjoyed the ride, learned a few things here and there. We’re just wondering how soon it will be till you’re on our screens again, and what the hell will become of us when you are.

--Lewis

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Image copyright BBC. Episode 4 of The Great Pottery Throw Down

Another serious episode of the Throw Down, more crying and sweating (no blood thank goodness) and happily, a slight reduction in sexual innuendo. Someone had to go of course, and Sandra, we salute you too, a bit of a gamble using Tellytubbies as inspiration for garden sculpture, but I liked it. Not quite sure how Matthew managed to win however, maybe my finger is slightly off the pulse of contemporary aesthetics, but hell’s bells, I guess that’s the beauty of modern creative freedom.  

I’m so happy that the Throw Down is bringing pottery back into the public consciousness, or is it that it was already reemerging and so they felt the need to make the show about it? Either way, the only problem is that it is also comes with a vaguely pernicious sense of urgency and an anxious threat of failure. And I’m not sure that’s how you should exist in any situation, especially when swimming in the juices of your own creative daemon, you’ll end up sinking,  or even doggy paddling.

And it’s starting to creep in here, at our studio too. Because of the show - or the zeitgeist - we are now at capacity with a growing waiting list; it’s hard to get on our courses (I get angry calls from people who’ve failed multiple times to sign up) although we run as many classes as we possibly can. It brings that same nervousness and frustration. It was never meant to be like that. We need calm here, and temperance. Tessa agrees with me. ‘make three pieces’, she says ‘take all the time in the world, make them in a way you can enjoy making them, put some You in them. Don’t be furiously churning out fifty for a sale or a show or a judge; they’ll have no real value in them’.  What wisdom!

Anyway, gripe over; next week it’s porcelain. Are they in for a treat?! What a challenge that can be at the best of times, our porcelain master and member Tom Kemp manages to make it look like a doddle as he calmly throws perfect 3-foot vases out of the stuff, but it isn’t, I know. It still gives me the runaround as it spins around, making itself into white mound of nothing again and again in my hands- and I’ve even done a Jo Davies masterclass.

Good luck team. Don’t sweat it.

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Episode 2 of the BBC's  Great Pottery Throw Down. Photo from the BBC website

Blimey the nerves! I don’t know how they hack it. It’s bad enough anyway, fretting over what will come out of the kiln after you have lovingly shaped caressed and poured your heart into a piece. Now one everyday slip up and it’s: ‘Chuck ‘em out the door!’

So we’re feeling for the contestants who remain on BBC2s The Great Pottery Throw Down. Judgment came and another brave soul is gone.

Oh no! Nigel come back, we loved your work! What does a crack matter in a basin anyway? I know I’ve been tempted, break something in the bisque firing: fix it with a bit of glaze in the second firing- if you have a BBC show to stay on, what the hell. Episode two gave us all a reminder of why we don’t attempt to make coiled sinks and bathroom ware every day. But now we will, we have to, we’re redoing the bathroom in the studio and have been inspired, again. So, a new project is born for one of our members: Make us a sink as beautiful as Matthew’s swirling green Aztec temple was, and it’s going in. Watch this space folks, I’ll post a picture of the winner.

I knew it would happen. Throwing blindfolded, what a torture. Please Tessa don’t make us do that one too. Good for TV viewing maybe, but I think we’ll skip that one here, not enough blindfolds anyway. What did almost slip past in a twinkling, was the vague nod to clay shrinkage rates which is always a real issue for sink makers and tile makers and in fact anything that requires exact measurements after artesanal work is fired. I was amazed at how many of them managed to slot that copper plug unit into the hole with precision first time of asking. High fives guys.

So, the competition in our own studio has taken place and the pieces inspired by the first episode have been put into the kiln -things here don’t tick over quite as fast they seem to on the telly- and we’re keen to see who’s won the first round; apparently the bowls do have to stack. Good luck guys!

Looking forward to next week’s episode, was that a raku kiln? Can’t wait for that one. Luckily we haven’t got one of those terrifying open-air, where’s-me-eyebrows fire pits yet or lord knows what Ms Barrett could be plotting for us. Also a daily smoke out of the whole of Hackney probably wouldn’t go down at all well with our neighbours.

-- Lewis

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