The Creative Process - Part One

As a potter, when I use a mug for the first time (before I fill it with hot coffee!) I like to hold the mug in my hands; feel the solidity and weight of the mug; turn it upside down to find a maker’s mark and see what kind of base or foot ring they put on the mug; figure out whether it was wheel thrown or slab built; what kind of glaze did they use; exactly how did they get that colour effect.  As a potter, I can appreciate the hours, the years, of work that goes into making a humble everyday mug. 

Before I began my pottery journey though, I just boiled the kettle and drank my coffee!

Next time you use your Clare Blount Pottery mug to enjoy your coffee, take a moment to wonder “how did this thing get made?”

My mugs start life as a ball of wet clay.  This clay gets rolled out into a flat slab and cut into a curved rectangle, and little 8cm circles.  These slabs are left to dry, overnight in the winter or for a full morning in the summer, and they are then coaxed and cajoled into a cylinder shape.  Handles are formed and shaped, and allowed to get a little stiff before being attached to the cylinder.  And a mug is born!

This newly formed mug gets put into my damp box and left overnight, allowing the clay to fully bond with itself and settle into its new shape.  The next day the mugs are left on a drying shelf until they become leather hard, this can take a few days depending on humidity levels in the air.  I put my maker’s mark and the year onto the bottom of the mug now.

At this stage in the process, if the mug is not living up to it's potential it can get thrown into a bucket of water and turned back into wet clay.  The next blog post will describe how, if the mug has escaped the reclaim bucket, it gets turned into a fully decorated and glazed mug ready for it's first cuppa