Read an Excerpt
Where I Discover Clay
I sometimes feel as if my life didn’t really begin until I started throwing pots. Until the age of sixteen I more or less lived online, peering into a virtual world. After arriving home from school, one that was so focused on craft, community and, often, spirituality, I would come in and switch on a screen to forget reality. My hands were moulded around a lump of plastic, a video-game controller, but this was soon to be replaced by a lump of soft, malleable clay.
I was born two months premature, incubated, only a speck in my grandfather’s sturdy hands. We lived in a quiet village in Norfolk called Maypole Green, where hedges, dank ponds and furrowed fields make up a majority of my memories from this time and all I have left are fleeting sounds, smells and stories I’ve been told. Our home was surrounded by what I remember as dense, monolithic hedgerows and we spent our time outside in the garden, running in the neighbouring fields, building dens and climbing branchy, wavering trees. We followed the tails of our cats who lived happily in the abundant greenery, apart from Dotty, a mean, scrawny white cat, spotted black, who would hiss hellfire as soon as we tried to stroke her.
I was six years old when we moved to London in 1998. My father’s commute into the city had become untenable and so we left the green surroundings for residential—and still comparatively green—north London, packing everything into a house on a corner next to Alexandra Park. We were downsizing, and my father still tells the story of how he burnt many of his belongings in a heaped bonfire prior to leaving, both as a means of accommodating his possessions in a smaller home and as an expression of protest, since he really loved the countryside.
My father, Mark, spent decades working in advertising; he was a successful art director and travelled relentlessly, even assisting in introducing McDonald’s to the UK at one point, but his heart was really in making, in craft. Alongside his career he pursued this passion, and throughout his life he has also been, and still is, a woodworker, metalworker and jeweller, and an acclaimed illustrator. He has long blond hair, like me and my brother, a kindly, crooked smile and thick-rimmed spectacles—the resemblance we share is at times uncanny.
My mother, Kate, is a photographer and gardener. As a parent she is carefree and never once questioned the choices I’d make in my life. She’s sharp and keen-eyed, quickly loses her temper and has a vast knowledge of the world, languages and the plants she surrounds herself with. She cared for Anatole and me, photographing gardens whilst we were in school. Tolly, which is what I’ve called my brother since I learnt to speak, is four years older than me. He has my dad’s blue eyes; I have my mum’s freckled brown. He’s left-handed like my dad, I’m right-handed like my mum. We grew up in houses crowded with pots, paintings and sculpture. My father even made pots of his own, the pieces once photographed by my mother, a picture that has come to sum up my life quite succinctly.
The new house was in a leafy part of the city, in an area built up with rows upon rows of houses running up and down the surrounding hills. It was all new to me, with vistas limited by buildings wherever I looked. As we first drove into London on the dreaded moving day we stopped on the side of the motorway, the skyline glinting in the distance, and I followed the ever-dwindling, glowing streetlights along the twisting road as they disappeared into the skyscrapers on the Isle of Dogs. That was in August, a few days before my birthday, and just a few days later I started at my new school in Kings Langley, which was a Waldorf Steiner school. In 1919, a year after the Great War ended, the educator and spiritualist Rudolf Steiner visited Waldorf-Astoria-Zigarettenfabrik, a cigarette factory in Germany. Emil Molt, the owner of the factory, asked Steiner if he’d like to set up a school for the workers’ children—the doors opened later that year and the first Waldorf Steiner school was established. The curriculum was based on Steiner’s anthroposophical philosophy (which encompassed the arts, architecture, agriculture and medicine) alongside the more traditionally academic school subjects. Anthroposophy is a way of life, a spiritual movement even, which claims to link the arts, the sciences and religion, aiming to nurture the soul in each of us and in human society as a whole. Steiner thought that we, as humans, were fashioned from spirit, soul and body, and that these developed throughout childhood and into adolescence.
I went into this education at six years old and found myself in a system that I adored, but which also contained some highly dubious ideas, embracing a multitude of pseudosciences – if you look far enough back, you’ll discover that Steiner himself had some rather frightening ideas concerning race and ethnicity. During all my time at Kings Langley, though, I can count on one hand the number of times we were taught anything actually anthroposophical. Steiner’s philosophies may have created the underlying infrastructure for how these schools are run, and many of his ideas remain, but many others have become outdated over the past century and aren’t taught – or, at least, they never were to us.
My parents decided that my brother and I would go there after visiting the school with friends to pick up their kids. They saw young children playing in lush gardens, where there was an emphasis on exploring and being outside, on playing, on socializing and singing together. The school wasn’t rigorously academic and the teachers they spoke to made it apparent that they wanted to focus on the children simply being themselves. I’ve never been a spiritual person, my family certainly isn’t either and even though we spent singing lessons chanting hymns, we also sang The Beatles and Frank Zappa. For me, singing the Lord’s Prayer had nothing to do with religion; instead, I revelled in the comradeship of being in a choir. Singing together, working well together and functioning as a community is, to me, what this system taught exceedingly well.
The Goetheanum, the building in Switzerland at the centre of this anthroposophical movement, looks quite unlike anything else. The exterior is built entirely from cast concrete that was poured into giant wooden moulds crafted by boat builders, for the obvious reason that they knew how to craft seamless, curvaceous structures. Right angles are few and far between and even if you search you’ll have a hard time finding many, save where the building meets the ground. This is one of Steiner’s philosophies: he thought that buildings should follow the human form, avoiding straight lines and harsh angles and, instead, embracing rounded edges, curves and billowing shapes.
The inside follows suit, but instead of cold concrete it is clad with warm wooden floors and furniture, the walls are painted with shades of soft primary colours with ethereal, angelic figures materializing from the contours of the brushwork, and there is colourful stained glass that bathes the curved rooms in swathes of beautiful light. Steiner believed that colour and human souls were intimately connected, which they might be, but he also believed that mushrooms weren’t to be eaten as they grow in dark and squalid places and contained hindering lunar forces, so I’ll let you think that over.
Steiner and the Waldorf education I had played a tremendous role during the first quarter of my ceramics education, and I want to put everything in context. I very much gave myself over to the craft and academic aspect of my Waldorf Steiner education but the other parts, the spiritual side of things, fell flat. I was placed into this education as a young child so it’s imprinted onto my being whether I like it or not, agree with it or not. All I know is that I probably wouldn’t be a potter had I not gone there.
My kindergarten mirrored the Goetheanum and it genuinely did feel like a mystical dwelling taken straight from the pages of a children’s book. It was in an entirely separate part of the school, hidden behind trees with a little winding path through some woods. It was surrounded by arching concrete walls that enveloped two large classrooms with wooden floors trodden smooth with the patter of tiny feet, filled with miniature handcrafted wooden furniture fit for five-yearolds. Part of the façade was covered in handmade mosaics; some tiles gilded gold that glinted in the sun. The smell of beeswax wafted through the corridors and light trickled in gently through wafer-thin, silky curtains that were draped across windows that had no right angles. The rooms themselves didn’t have severe corners, only soft angles. Even the paper we used in the early years had rounded corners.
Inside we’d sing and play games. Our toys were wooden or made from other natural materials and there wasn’t a single piece of plastic in sight. There were no worksheets and no tests. Instead we sat in circles and learnt to knit together and throw and catch soft, handwoven balls and create ghostly woollen figures, angels, to place atop Christmas trees. Our teachers were kind and gentle, and often they’d be joined by younger teachers in training, or even students from the upper school returning to lend a hand. It was tranquil and otherworldly, and as a child I felt free, cared for and happy.
