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Welcome to Ceramic Review

Ceramic Review is the magazine for contemporary and historical ceramics, ceramic art and pottery.


Ceramic Review Issue 331

January/February 2025

Petra Reynolds takes us through the techniques and processes she uses to slab build and decorate a butter dish with lid

My first encounters with clay were at the local Technical College in my then hometown of Southend-on-Sea. Finding myself beginning on the A Level route and having serious doubts about my initial choices, I found myself wandering into the ceramics department. I was immediately drawn to the hands-on practical way I could apply myself in this earthy space. What also struck me was the supportive nature of the community that resided in the college pottery. I felt a sense of familiar comfort and reassurance that enabled me to find an avenue for self-expression in what proved to be an incredibly versatile material. Tutors Liz Culley and her late husband Bennett Cooper showed me a way forward that no one in school seemed to know about. Visits to Bennett’s wonderful inspiring workshop in Mistley gave an insight to a different way of life. It felt like there was no going back.

My study of ceramics continued in Cardiff from 1992, which is where I met my husband Jeremy Steward. Here we both met Mick Casson who was a visiting lecturer and demonstrator. In 1995 we were both invited to work for Mick and Sheila Casson as part-time apprentices at their practice based in Wobage Farm Craft Workshops in South Herefordshire. Joining this creative community was incredibly supportive and transformational. 

Jeremy and I have worked alongside each other now for almost 30 years, whilst raising a family together since 2007. As in everyone’s life there are challenges, but ultimately the connection between our individual expression of this shared life, developing separately but alongside one another, is a support and inspiration. 

During my first year at Cardiff, our tutor Alan Barrett Danes introduced us to some fantastic clay exercises using descriptive words to inspire different clay experiments. It was during this time that I discovered my love of hand building with slabs, bending, tearing, cutting and joining. I was immediately drawn to the malleability of soft slabs. Allowing them to set just a little, but not to leatherhard, enables me to bend and join patterns to create soft shapes, often cushion-like volumes such as in this butter dish lid. 

As the years went by, I worked on trying to make more functional work, which required the development of patterns, rather like the process of a dressmaker. In this way shapes could easily be repeated. I love the challenge of transforming ideas from flat paper into pots, and vice versa. Sometimes I make free-hand maquettes in soft clay and then work back from clay to paper. There is lots of trial and error and dedicated refinement of details, scale and volume. 

I have early memories as a small child being fascinated with things such as lids that were cut into triangular sections so they could swivel and interlock. A strong memory of my nursery years was clutching a rolling pin at the pastry table. This seeming fascination with something flat turning into three dimensions was evident from a young age. Maybe these simple early leanings are more significant than we realise.

Inspiration often derives from the processes themselves and the materials used, one small idea flowing into another through small happenings during the making process. Images and motifs are drawn from my everyday environments; from work and home, family and motherhood, stories that weave the tapestry of our lives, inspiring the more narrative aspects of my decoration. As Georgia O’Keeffe tells us: ‘I found I could say things with colour and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way – things I had no words for.’

Making pots enables me to combine using my head, heart and hands, transforming clay into useful shapes that I hope enhance the everyday moments in the lives of others.

 

For details visit wobage.co.uk. For courses visit workshops-at-wobage.co.uk