Blackhills Entry 1: Fourteen Days Focused on Pottery

I spent two full weeks in March working with John Christie at his studio, Blackhills Pottery, in the northeast of Scotland. John’s studio is in a beautiful part of the world, the light is different there and the water is sweet. It’s surrounded by old birch and larch, and you can see for miles out to the Moray Firth. In the studio’s throwing room, the sun streams through the window in the morning - sunlight catching pots, feathers, stones on the window ledge - and the sun sets from the window of the glazing room in the evening. It’s a special place.

Two full weeks of pottery. I work four days a week as an academic researcher, usually go for a long walk somewhere one day a week (pre-lockdown), and spend the other two days (and whenever else I can) making pottery. It’s my joy and my obsession but I can only give it so much time within balance of everything else. Leading up to my time at Blackhills I couldn’t wait to see what fourteen days in a row focused on pottery would feel like.

Over the two weeks, together with John and French potter Mélanie Chevalier, we developed and tested ash glazes and prepared for a wood firing in the second week. Working systematically and taking detailed notes has become second nature to me in my work as a researcher, so I was responsible for planning and preparing the 100+ glaze tests, using triaxial- and line-blends. We tested glazes using oilseed rape straw, birch, and rhododendron ash and the process looked a bit like this:

Process

Planning the approach; Preparing materials; Measuring; Measuring; Measuring; Measuring; Mixing; Dipping; Firing; Reading the tests; Making sense of the tests; Coming back to the same tests again;

And again

Selecting contenders to test further; Testing again

And again.

It was all-encompassing, focused work. The sort of work where you completely lose track of time, you forget to eat and then scoff down five biscuits in one go, where having to go pee is a nuisance, and it doesn’t matter that you have one bar of mobile signal because you have clay on your hands and you’re not checking your phone anyways.

I loved every minute of it.