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It frightens me how old I must be when I consider that I have been making pots for twenty-three years!

I was studying painting at Tresham College, Kettering, in 1982 when I turned my hand to potting for the first time. A determination to master the skill of throwing proved a major distraction and soon I was in trouble with my painting tutors, but I had found my medium and there began an obsession that has dominated and guided my life ever since.

A trip to Winchcombe pottery, watching Eddie Hopkins at the wheel making jugs secured my fate, painting was abandoned and I was accepted onto the Ceramics course at Derby College of H.E., at the time one of the finest courses in the country. The course was specifically tailored to provide a thorough training in the skills required to start a pottery workshop.

While at Derby I experimented with the many different approaches to ceramic process, raku, stoneware fired with gas, electricity and wood, building saltglaze kilns fuelled with diesel oil, but none excited me as much as the effects I could achieve with a thin slip over a red earthenware body.

As a schoolboy of eleven, I had excavated a medieval kiln site at Lyveden in Northants with the school archaeological society. The excavation had revealed hundreds of medieval shards and I remember the excitement of handling these pieces that had been abandoned in the soil for centuries. I returned to the site as a student, now a ploughed field, to walk the furrows and amassed box-full after box-full of treacly lead-glazed shards that dictated the direction of my work and later my dissertation.

Upon leaving college I sought employment at a local flowerpot factory, honing my throwing skills, the emphasis upon speed and production of runs of like objects proving most useful in later years. The work was arduous, above all boring, but the experience invaluable!

I moved to Liverpool where I briefly flirted with industrial production of slip cast lamp-bases (I'm not proud of this, pink was the most popular colour incidentally). These were hard times and the challenge of art gave way to the challenge of survival.

In 1990, in order to escape the horrible monster I had created, I took a post as ceramic technician at the Art College in Exeter, where I still have a part-time job managing the technician team. This move was to set me back on the right path as I met up again with an old chum and college contemporary Nic Collins and became friend and firing assistant to my gurus Clive Bowen and Svend Bayer.

During the subsequent years I made pots at Clive's and Nic's and in a couple of small workshops in the village where I lived, firing in their wood kilns or my own gas kiln.

In 2004 I achieved my lifelong dream and established Hollyford Pottery, deep in the Mid-Devon countryside, as a fully operational workshop with a large kiln fuelled with wood.

The influence of the environment

I make country pots. This is not because of the impossibilities of running such a venture in an urban area, with the chopping of wood and the smoke of the kiln, but because the countryside is an intrinsic element within the fabric of my work.

If I worked in a city, so many aspects of my own nature would be different. I could not imagine that my work would resolve itself in the same way. At Hollyford, all the senses are stirred by the natural environment.

The workshop is situated at the end of a rough farm track, overlooking a shallow valley, its far side, rising fields topped by a small deciduous woodland.

In the summer, the brambles and nettles grow thick about the workshop walls. Campion and pennywort, foxglove and hemlock fill the verges and the hedgerow. The small oak tree beside the workshop bares leaves with tones of pale pink and yellow and a vast range of greens, from deep bottle to a vivid lime.

As the seasons change, the rainfall increases and huge muddy puddles surround the workshop. The array of earthenware colours in a Devon autumn is breathtaking as green of ferns and leaves become an infinite tonal range of fiery brown and yellow.

Winter brings more rain and more mud and the woodland opposite cuts harsh lines against the sky with bare branches. The sky is vast in the countryside, without interruption from buildings. The terrain of the woodland floor is laid bare.

The wood-burner is roaring and the workshop is warm enough to work in shirt sleeves. The days are short and it becomes impossible to find my way around outside in the dark; and at night time in the middle of the Devon countryside it can be very, very dark. The greens are deep and cold, but the red soil in the fields is alive with sweeping lines combed by the plough.

Spring seems to be a long time coming, but when it does it is spectacular and brings a realisation of the necessity for winter. The delicate primroses in the hedgerows are astonishing with their green and yellow and the pink of their slight stems. The trees across the valley radiate a haze of vibrant green.

I strive to capture the tones and textures of the countryside in my pots, choosing a basic palette of earth colours from the naturally occurring minerals of the rural environment.

Nic Collins

Nic is an exceptional potter and a top bloke. We were mates at college in the early eighties and met up again when I moved to Devon in 1990. Since then I've watched Nic's work develop into the beautiful pots he makes today. I have huge respect for his obsessive determination throughout the past fifteen years, his absolute refusal to compromise. www.nic-collins.co.uk

Clive Bowen

Clive lives and works in an idyllic place in North Devon, with a beautiful garden full of ducks and herbs. I've been firing with Clive for about fifteen years and have a house full of his pots so he's been a huge influence. In his pots I see the confident ease of making, of a potter with an inherent understanding of the materials. He makes it look really easy and it isn't! He's a really interesting and knowledgeable lovely man too and spending time with somebody like that has to be inspiring.

I took these snaps at his pottery, click for enlargements.

Svend Bayer

Svend's sense of form blows me away. He's a master of the curve and gets it spot on every time. I used to fire Svend's kiln a lot years ago so spent a fair bit of time at his workshop and with his pots. I think they're incredible.

Michael Cardew

Cardew was amazing, particularly in his early potting days at Winchcombe. Some of the pots that do it for me most are the ones that have copped it a bit in the kiln and had a bit too much flame and temperature. You can really tell those ones have been fired with a naked flame. I keep getting a reckless urge to over fire my kiln but have to date resisted the temptation!

Medieval and Country Pottery

I have collected country pottery for twenty years. I love the rawness of the simple pitchers and pancheons that were made in these potteries for centuries for supply to the local rural communities. The craftsmanship of the makers is extraordinary, their skills honed so that the pots were made with the fewest number of moves, the marks of making loose and spontaneous. Somehow they represent an era much less complicated than today's technology infused go-fast age. They embody rural life and the countryside, similarly with medieval pottery; a little romantic the notion maybe. Medieval pots appeal because of their earthy and sometimes almost whimsical qualities. I use all the same traditional materials, the basic palette of colours made from raw naturally occurring minerals as used for hundreds of years until the demise of the country potteries, mainly after WWI, with the development of better communication links, industrialisation and the death on the battlefield of much of the skilled workforce.

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