Better late than never

I am sitting here wondering what to write. After all the false starts, set-backs, emotional trauma, and failures just to get to this - writing my blog on my new website - I am pinching myself (albeit half-heartedly as I’m knackered) that I’ve managed to reach this stage at all. The months of waiting for a tiny village rental to become a place I could call “studio,” you’d think I’d have built up a supply of words: triumphs, manifestos, melodramas. Instead I have a quiet, stubborn blankness.

Maybe that’s honest enough.

There’s a temptation to frame the whole journey as a tidy narrative: struggle, revelation, success. It’s nicer to read and easier to share. But the truth is messier. For every small victory — a mug that sits right in the hand, a kiln load that comes out intact, actually selling my pieces — there have been handfuls of failures and long, flat stretches where progress felt impossible.

But, for fearing of sounding like an arse, those false starts and set-backs was not because I was on the wrong path; it was the path that led me here now. They make the good bits mean more (although when I’m frustrated or dead on my feet, it remains a challenge..).

In the studio I like chunky pieces with personality. I don’t care for fragile perfection. I make things that are practical and honest: bowls that can resist (he says with fingers crossed) be slammed down onto the table, jewellery you can wear while gardening, mugs that will survive a tumble off a low (very low) table. This approach is carried through in my writing too. No flourish for the sake of flourish. No pretence. Just the plain truth of getting up, mixing clay, pushing through the long patience required for drying and firing, adjusting when a glaze betrays you. Repeat.

So if I’m stumped today, maybe the point is simply to admit it. There’s value in that. Admitting the pause means the pause is part of the story, not a blemish to hide.

I suppose that’s the lesson about ceramics: keep working. Keep ploughing on. Or, rather, wedging on, lols. You can’t fast-forward a kiln. You can’t shortcut drying times. But you can keep shaping, keep testing, keep learning from the things that don’t go to plan. Writing a blog after all the stops and starts doesn’t require a grand revelation. It just needs the first honest line.

So here's the first honest line: I’ve been delayed, derailed, and delighted in equal measure, and I’m still here, making some more things to place in my new little teeny tiny studio.

Now I’m off to make something — or at least try — and I’ll tell you about it when the clay is dry.