Why working with clay matters in childhood

At Turning Earth, we believe that everyone is creative, however well they may have buried that part of themselves on their journey to adulthood.

Creativity isn’t something that belongs to a particular kind of person. It’s something that needs the right environment to develop. And without that environment, it’s entirely possible to grow up believing you’re not creative at all.

I know this because it’s happened to me.

My brother Lewis and I, who founded Turning Earth, were taken to pottery classes by our mum when we were children. We weren’t always keen. Our weekly class, early on a Saturday morning, could feel like a bit of a chore. I always wanted to use the potter’s wheel, but the older children got to do that. Instead, I made little faces: witches, women, characters with something of a person in them.

My mum always made me feel that they were good. And I remember the feeling of being good at something, of making something that had come out of my own imagination.

I still have one of those little heads. I found it in a plant pot the other day.

Looking back, I realise those classes gave me something much more important than the ability to make pots. They gave me an early experience of my own creativity, and the knowledge that I could make things.

We’re not all born knowing what we’re capable of

Something that has made me think about this a lot is music.

I grew up believing I wasn’t musical. I wasn’t taught an instrument, and somehow I absorbed the idea that making music wasn’t something I could do. I spent years in relationships with musicians rather than making music myself.

Then, in my forties, I discovered that I could write beautiful melodies, and that making music was one of the things I loved doing most.

It was wonderful, but there was sadness in it, too. I couldn’t help wondering how much of my life I’d spent believing I couldn’t do something that turned out to be so important to me.

How many people go through life believing they’re not creative because they’ve never had the opportunity to find out otherwise?

I think this is one of the most important things we can give children: the chance to discover what they’re capable of before they’ve decided what they’re good at and what they’re not.

Learning to slow down

We live in a world where more and more of childhood happens through screens. As a parent, I find it worrying how quickly my own children reach for a screen whenever one is available.

I think children need experiences that ask something different of them: opportunities to slow down, use their hands and become absorbed in the physical world.

Working with clay isn’t always easy. You can’t entirely control it, and you can’t simply think your way to the result you want. You have to pay attention, feel what’s happening and respond to it.

Throwing on a wheel requires coordination, concentration and patience. Your first pot might collapse. Your next might be wonky. Gradually, you begin to understand what went wrong and what you can change.

There’s no instant undo button. You have to work things out for yourself.

I think there’s real value in that experience, in discovering that you can struggle with something and, through your own efforts, get better at it.

And there’s something else, too. When you make something with your hands, you discover your own way of seeing the world. If you ask two people to make a face, they’ll make two completely different faces. Each will reveal something about what they notice, what they find interesting, and what they imagine.

It’s exposing, but also liberating. You begin to understand that your particular way of seeing things is worth expressing.

Why we’re doing this at Turning Earth

When our own children became old enough to benefit from the experience we’d had, we started thinking about what they were missing.

We didn’t just want them to have a play with clay. We wanted them to have a proper learning opportunity, with experienced teachers who could teach them the skill of throwing and help them develop over time.

Those early pottery classes gave Lewis and me a relationship with making things, with learning through our hands, and with the idea that if you keep trying, you can get better. Those ways of thinking have stayed with us, and in many ways they’ve become part of Turning Earth’s culture. We wouldn’t have opened the studios without that can-do, make-it-happen attitude we grew up with.

That’s why we’ve started running ceramics classes for children.

We want to give them the opportunity to develop a real skill, but also to discover something about themselves. To experience the satisfaction of making something with their own hands, and to find out what they’re capable of.

Our mum gave us that opportunity. She couldn’t have known what it would mean to us decades later. She simply made space for us to learn something and encouraged us to keep going.

I’m so grateful that she did.

It’s never too late to give yourself the right environment, as I’ve discovered. But how wonderful if we can give children that environment from the beginning.