I was fortunate to travel to the United Kingdom this year for my PD Trip.
For my first day, I pre-arranged a 3 hour private lesson from London artist, Tessa Eastman. Tessa Eastman website. Along with a great lesson, I worked with 4 different U.K. made clays. The studio kiln fired my work so I was able to bring home the pieces for students to explore, hold and handle.
I visited Somerset House to view the art fair titled, Collect 2025. Presented by the Crafts Council, Collect is the leading international art fair for contemporary craft and design. Artworks included ceramics, furniture, glass, wearable art, precious and non-precious metalwork, sculpture, textiles and woodwork. Running from 2/27/25- 3/2/25 40 galleries from across the globe represented over 400 contemporary artists. Each gallery created its own signature curation in response to the historic rooms of Somerset House and commissioned new bodies of work especially for the fair. 80% of the works on show will have been made in the last five years. Artist Tessa Eastman was featured in the art fair.
For my Art History repertoire, I had the opportunity to visit Stonehenge in Salisbury, which I found to be a very peaceful and meditative experience. I learned about the movements of the sun, moon and planets, and the solar alignment at Stonehenge. It is a masterpiece of engineering and is evident in the monumental scale of the sarsen stones and the blue stones. Did you know Stonehenge is over 4,500 years old and is older than the pyramids?
Swoop at Stonehenge
I also visited the V & A Museum to view their extensive ceramics collection, and the Tate Modern.
The majority of my trip was in the central area of the country in Stoke-on-Trent; a historical pottery mecca. I filled my days visiting various potteries and their factories. I first toured the Gladstone Pottery Museum. This is also the location for the TV series, The Great Pottery Throw Down, and it is filmed at the museum every fall. I have watched almost every episode. I was lucky to be given a private sneak peek, behind locked doors of where the show is filmed.
Although the pottery fired its last bottle oven kiln in the 1970’s it was a successful pottery site for two hundred years. I booked a short lesson in working with bone china clay and was taught how to make an elaborate clay flower. For this clay you can’t use water, you have to dip your hands in oil otherwise the clay will disintegrate!
The Pottery Museum and Art Gallery was down the road from my hotel. Here, one can find the world’s greatest collection of Staffordshire ceramics!
From here, I spent a full day at the World of Wedgwood. World of Wedgwood is a gold award-winning tourist destination in the Staffordshire countryside. Home to Stoke-on-Trent’s most prestigious pottery brand, Wedgwood. I arranged a private wheel throwing session with a woman using Jasperware clay. This clay body recipe was perfected by Josiah Wedgwood and is a secret recipe only used at Wedgwood. It is not sold or distributed. It is a stoneware clay, but throws like a tricky, porcelain clay body. Wedgewood is glazing and shipping the bowl I made in the technique taught to me so my students can see and handle the jasperware clay. While on a factory tour, I learned that all ceramics wares made at Wedgewood are either slip cast or wheel thrown. Some decorators and painters I talked to have worked for the company for 40 years. I attended a private guided gallery of their V&A Wedgwood Collection. I enjoyed the cultural experience of an afternoon tea – lunch. It was a day to remember!
I visited a clay supplier named Potclays, owned for 4 generations, and I received a private factory tour. I learned that the Stoke-on-trent area was full of coal and where there is coal there is fire clay. The hundreds of potteries in operation in the late 1700’s and later used coal to fuel their bottle oven kilns.
I spent a day trip to Middleport Pottery, a working pottery which King Charles donated 7 million to for restorations. Originally an architect designed this pottery compound on a plot of land from the ground up. Middleport Pottery makes what they call Burleigh pottery due to the original owners being named Burgess and Leigh. They have been making earthenware since 1851, based at Middleport Pottery in Stoke-on-Trent since 1889. They are famous for their blue cobalt tissue transfer decoration which uses engraved copper rollers to achieve archive patterns. They are the only pottery in the world to still use this technique. It is deeply rooted in craftsmanship, an apprentice applying tissue transfer has to work for 7 years before they are hired officially. To give you an understanding of the bottle oven kilns, Middleport Pottery’s kiln has 11 fireplaces in it to stoke coal. They are huge! These kilns are not used anymore, but one kiln is built into the side of the building and is still standing. Of the hundreds of potteries once in existence in this area only 4 are in operation today.
Later in my day a sweet tour guide who was off duty drove me to historic sites in the town to see a Pottery School and Art College where Clarice Cliff, an English ceramic artist and designer had attended before attending a school in London. She became the head of the Newport Pottery Factory and creative Department and was known for her later Art Deco style. See her empowering story from 1922-1963 in the film, The Color Room from 2021.
My time spent in these areas was so rich, I brought back a lot of materials to share with my students. Items to read, new tools for the studio, deep discussions about the history of pottery in the U.K., and to view over 1,000 images shared on google drive from my trip. Students were even able to hold and handle the bone china flower, a wedgwood tea cup and saucer, and arriving in the mail soon, a jasperware pot.