Transcriber: Rhonda Jacobs Reviewer: David DeRuwe
I am a potter,
and that’s what it says on my passport.
And I have been making pots for, oh, over - hello, lovey - over 40 years.
And tonight, I just want to really just explain to you what making means to me -
I’m off already - what making means to me and how important it is as a process
to any one individual and the wider community at large.
It defines us as a species.
And so the first little thing I wanted to say
was I remember when I was about six or seven,
and I was playing at the bottom of the garden in our family home in Finchley,
and there was a brook at the bottom of the garden,
and you could quite often see me down there
hacking big lumps of clay out of the riverbank
and hurling them and dragging them back up into the garden
to make sort of rudimentary pots.
And I often think, I wonder if it was the Neolithic DNA in me,
you know, as a young boy, you know,
sort of almost emulating those first struggles of the human race
of bringing water up into a sort of a makeshift campsite.
Or was it merely the fact that I was a young boy
just exploring the natural world around me
and using the materials that I found to ignite my imagination,
to express myself through that act of making.
And I often used to make these - oh dear me -
(Laughter)
I often used to make these pots,
and I used to immerse them in the bonfires in the garden.
And to much great delight, you know, chemistry and physics would take over,
and usually these pots, invariably or not, would blow up, and I used to love that;
it was fascinating.
And what was really happening
was that subconsciously I was learning about different materials.
I was learning the boundaries of what these materials could do
through my act of making and playing and imagination.
And I carried this all the way through my education
to the point where I left school and became a clay boy in a pottery,
just an old fashioned apprenticeship, if you like,
sweeping the floor, making the tea.
And I remember saying to my then-boss at the time, Alan,
and I remember it as if it was like yesterday, seriously,
because it was so poignant and it was so shocking,
his answer to my question.
And my question was, “Alan, you know,
when can I start making pots with you guys on the wheel, you know,
to fulfill all the orders that we’ve got, all these customers that we have?”
And his response was short.
There was probably a few expletives in there somewhere.
It was short and sweet.
And he said, “Oh, I’d give it about five or six years.”
And as a young adult,
that was the last thing I really wanted to hear.
It really shocked me, in fact.
It was really disheartening at the time.
Over the years that I worked in the pottery,
I began to realize there was more to his statement, his simple statement.
It was that the five or six years would be around about enough time,
not just the mere sort of fact of being able to produce something of quality
enough to sell to our customers.
It was the amount of time
to actually understand the material that we were working with,
and in this case it was obviously clay,
but it could be anything.
It could be wood; it could be glass.
And subsequent years after that, when I started my own studio in London,
I began to take that concept of that statement
and really turn it on its head and think,
Well, actually five or six years is no time at all
to really learn and understand what this material could do for me,
what I could do with it.
And it’s been a fascinating and really wonderful journey.
And
when one embarks on making, anyone,
there’s all manner of thoughts that go through your head.
Almost instantaneously when you’re making,
that process of making and handling a natural material -
one of the really regular kind of thoughts
that used to go through my head for quite a long time
was self-doubt, actually.
And also the need for control,
not only just to control the material that I was working with,
but to control my cognitive experience with it.
Some people like the fact of no control whatsoever
when they’re working with a natural material
or indeed to extol an emotion
through working with a material
or just the practical application of solving a challenge through making,
which we have done since we’ve crawled out of the primeval soup,
let’s face it.
We have always been a species
that has completely and utterly problem-solved
through our talent for making.
We have these -
that’s my feet, by the way, not my shoes;
hands;
and above all, more importantly, we have these, thumbs.
And we have -
As a species, we are unique on the planet
for not only making things to help our lives become better
or improve our lives,
but also making things to emulate emotion,
to get a message across in what we make to an observer, to someone outside,
to take that message to a wider community.
And
dare I mention the pandemic and lockdown?
But for me, the pandemic, the lockdown
was a really enlightening moment personally,
because my life, quite frankly, it doesn’t have any routine at all.
Literally, no - I have no [routine].
I’m all over the place. Jazz hands everywhere.
And what the pandemic allowed me to do was to actually get into a routine.
And I would wake up - Marge and I are very early risers;
we usually get up about five or six in the morning.
And like millions of other people,
we usually do our exercises with Joe Wicks on a big screen in the studio.
And then I’d venture down into the studio.
And an amazing thing happened.
Or an amazing thing is what I discovered about myself.
And it was because of this routine that I’d got into,
this calming feeling in this situation that I was in.
When I sat down on the wheel,
and I started cognitively working, physically working with the clay,
I had this kind of Pavlovian response.
My body and my mind would connect completely.
And my mind over the years of sitting on the wheel making thousands of pots
had trained itself to actually connect with my physical self.
And it was quite a moment.
And one of the things that I used to think about
when I’m sitting on the wheel -
I think I probably heard it on the radio and it just sowed a seed in my head.
And it was those early cave paintings in France,
Lascaux, those those amazing, wonderful, upper Paleolithic -
it’s hard to say that word, upper Paleolithic period - cave paintings.
They are stunning.
They are wonderful in their aesthetic value
as they are in the messages they give you.
And it wasn’t so much the aesthetic that I was really sort of thinking about;
it was the the thought of the person that actually did them,
the person that actually made them,
that achieved these wonderful paintings on these cave walls.
Why?
Why did they do them?
Was it purely a sort of a pictorial diary
of what they did in their community,
what was important to them?
Or was it a message to future generations
to explain what was important to them as a community
and how they hunted and how they lived?
And it was probably a bit of both, but we’ll never know.
15,000 BCE we’re talking. 15,000 BCE.
This is thousands and thousands of years ago.
And
we’ve always had this capacity not only to make the chairs that you’re sitting on,
but to extol a message in what we make.
And -
as I say, I go up and down the country all over the place,
and I meet numerous people and dare I say, you know, I often meet people who say,
“I’ve been watching that pottery program on the telly. It’s great. It’s great.
And it’s got me thinking.
It’s got me thinking I should really go to pottery classes.
It looks wonderful.”
And they extol this enthusiastic sort of verve for going to learn
and do something in pottery.
And, you know, it doesn’t have to be pottery.
It could be woodwork; it could be anything creative,
anything that you’re making with your hands.
And
they then go on to describe and tell me,
“Yeah, I walked in. It was a three hour session.
I mean I sat down at the bench, and I started working with the clay,
and the hours just flew by.
I looked up at the clock, and it was time to go home. It was amazing.”
And they talk to me with surprise.
And I’m obviously, being the person I am being very polite, listening to them.
I’m not surprised at all, literally not surprised.
Because it’s that moment when you start -
(Voice trembles)
when you start making, you enter a private world;
you enter an intimacy between you, your mind and the materials.
And that is a very, very sacred place.
And whether you’re making for self-gratification
or as a personal challenge or making something really practical,
it’s a really emotive place to be.
I’ve often thought that that making process,
that cognitive skill that you apply to any material and achieve something
is the purest and the most honest form of communication that we have as humans.
It defines us. It's developed our world.
It has made us who we are.
And so I urge anyone and everyone
to make something, at least something in their lives.
It doesn’t have to be big.
It doesn’t have to be clever.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be good.
But it’s that process of thinking,
acting upon that thought, from beginning, middle to end,
that is something that you can’t experience anywhere else.
And
it’s this process of making that I find incredibly crucial
for our young to experience in their education.
It’s incredibly crucial.
And there’s a couple of reasons,
but the main reason is
that they open up their mind,
they open up their imagination,
and they cognitively work with this natural material, whatever it may be,
and the buck stops with you.
You’re there with this natural material, and if it goes wrong, so be it.
If it goes right, brilliant.
But there are consequences to your actions and your actions alone.
And it’s that consequences, and that process all the way along,
and that decision-making
that makes it really an exceptional experience for that person.
And I often describe my career as a series of failures
with a few successes interjected along the way, thank God.
But it’s those failures in that process of making
that really helps us to learn and move on.
It’s those challenges to overcome through that making process
that is so important for our young
and for anyone to really, really experience.
And it’s those failures and those challenges
that ultimately make us better people
and also better makers.
Thank you.
(Applause)