Pottery Class for Ceangal

What is Ceangal ?

As part of this there has been a series of event classes run in Gairloch by volunteer tutors. Here are some better pictures and more information on the Ceangal blog

History > skip if you know the story>

For those of you who don’t know Pottery is my what I was trained in. I went to Art college in the 80’s full of Pre-Raphaelite idealism, the painting tutor clique at the time liked sort of flat primitive looking fish, outlining and frying pan ego-centric muddy coloured rubbish. I didn’t, so threatened with failing grades if i didn’t chose a design subject to specialise in I huffily opted for the pragmatic, earthy, skill set of pottery to learn, figuring I already knew how to paint the way I wanted to anyway. So after college with babies underfoot, i realised I couldn’t afford picture frames, so painting was still sort of out of reach. With the infallible logic of youth I set up a pottery business instead, my first wheel costing only £10 !

Fast forward to my second shop & studio by 2005 business was getting tough, i needed to rent out my space and take on some emergency waged employment. And that was that. I haven’t really played with clay since then and have gone off on my visual art adventures instead. ( wow 15 years reduced to a paragraph? impressive ).

So I was a little concerned with this pottery class, would I remember how to do it ? or would I be beset with woe that I can no longer do pottery ? ( no room at house & I had to sell my big kiln ).

Of course it was all fine, very relaxed and enjoyable, clay is so therapeutic it uses a completely different bit of the brain for most people and it circumnavigates all the usual creative performance angst people have ( ‘ I can’t draw ‘ etc). Everyone started off with thumb pots and sure enough they soon diversified into some lovely designs, with laughter and some very strange sound effects !

Much fun, I’m looking forward to seeing the work fired ( Thanks to Pat at the school ) and getting up again for a get together on the 8th May to see all the other work that has been getting produced.