2026 – Taking part in Potfest South East – Glynde Place

I trained briefly at Farnham art school in 1972, and worked for a year with Joe Finch at Appin Pottery in Scotland and set up my workshop in East Sussex at Drusillas Zoo Park, selling direct to the public from the showroom.

Inspired by the ideas, the example and the writing of Bernard Leach, we mixed our own stoneware body and glazes and produced a range of useful affordable pots glazed in Tenmoku, Celadon and a white glaze. I worked with Ted Hughes and Mo Hamid, and always liked the idea that making pots was best done in a small team without much division of labour. We had help from the Craft Council with a setting up grant and later with a loan to rebuild and enlarge the kiln. Over time we developed our brushwork, used a wider range of underglaze colours and used porcelain to show our brushwork to best effect.

About 1990, a young woman walked into the showroom clutching a large book- ‘The designs of William De Morgan’ published by Richard Dennis. It was a shock and a revelation. De Morgan’s work opened my eyes to possibilities which Leach would have condemned as Victorian excess and probably reacted against. I admired De Morgan’s imagination, his inventiveness, his lively designs, bright colours and and his humour. It was a world away from the austerity of the Japanese aesthetic Leach had promoted so successfully.

A grant from Arts Training South enabled me to take a short course on lustre with the late Marjorie Clinton, and these few days set the course for the next 25 years of what was to became an obsession.

I was joined at the pottery by Kerry Bosworth just before the millennium, and we left Drusillas when it changed ownership. After some searching, I found my dream workshop-an old farm building in Hankham, next to a manor house with a Saxon Hall, near Pevensey castle, where first the Romans and a thousand year later, the Normans chose to invade.

Here, with a smaller gas kiln, built with the help of a friend, Kerry and I began to experiment making reduction fired lustre. Few people could help, because we were using essentially the same technique as the Muslim potters of the Middle East; as De Morgan; as Alan Caiger-Smith and a handful of potters worldwide. Gradually we were able to make sense of the results we were getting. We kept records of every firing, and later, where every pot was placed in the kiln. But the variables are many and every firing brings delights and disappointments in equal measure and its share of mysteries. That is as it should be, because these unplanned surprises keep the work from becoming too mechanical and provide the right climate for invention, exploration and the work of tomorrow.

www.jcjpottery.co.uk