Ceramic Review Masterclass: Jeremy Steward

So my journey with clay started where I grew up in Cornwall. So I grew up in Carvis Bay just outside of St Ives and I was lucky enough to study A-Level Ceramics at Penwith College in Penzance. I did a foundation in Falmouth before moving on to a degree in ceramics in Cardiff which is a hugely influential time for me and my partner Petra. It's where we first met Mick Casson and in 1995 when we graduated we had the privilege of being invited here to Wabwich Farm. We've been here nearly 30 years. We make our own clay here from dry powder. Pet and I use three different types of clay. A very high iron bearing clay which is this one and then a white stoneware and then a buff which is somewhere in the middle. So I make my teapots in batches of sort of between six and ten at a time and this current range of work I've been making is based upon some quite deeply rouletted textured surfaces. So I started carving these roulettes and they're derived from often from nature or from objects. The teapot that you'll see me throwing here is derived from an old kiln saw blade. So that kind of thing I'm drawing influence from the environment around me. So yeah the throwing of these teapots and and a lot of this work which is rouletted requires that the the wall of the pot is very thick so it's barely thrown really. I've got to make sure that the lower sort of quarter of the pot is thrown quite well out but then I want at least 12 if not 15 or 20 mil in in the top half of the pot. So it's it's strongly collared. It's not a typical throw in that way. I use throwing slurry which is just a basic ball clay china clay and I use that in contrast to the darker iron rich clays. So yeah once I've set that blank up it's usually set up overnight or in the summer it might just be an hour or two or half an hour in the sun or something like that. The moisture is evaporated from the surface and the roulette will move freely and slowly either around the circumference of the pot or some of the others I run diagonally so that's what I've done in the case of this teapot I'm throwing today. To prevent the roulette from soaking up too much moisture from the direct impact from the clay I just dip the roulettes in a little bit of ball clay powder. These deeper roulettes require a little bit more sensitivity when the form is then filled out. I give it a right old tickle from the inside out. If I was to just spin it out evenly from the inside I'd rupture the thinnest part of the impression so I have to be quite careful with the way it's bellied out which is part of the kind of organic process and the overall sort of mould feel to the outside surface of the teapot that I'm after. Often with these deep textures there's a bit of a recovery process to try and true up the top. I learned as a student that it's much easier to make all your teapot lids the same size so I'm careful even though it's a very organic process of making the bodies I'm really careful that all the lids are identical. So I throw my lids and my spouts off the hump so yeah the lids are effectively thrown upside down. The flange of the lid has a little I call it a natch I don't even know if that's a word it's a word we use in the pottery. It's a little catch to make sure the lid doesn't fall forwards and out as you're pouring. The bodies are glazed before the spouts are added so the shino glaze we use for the liner in a lot of our covered pots is quite thick because it's a raw glaze so yeah it's easier to glaze before you spout and you're not worried about blocking holes. I used to throw a board of spouts to meet that board of teapot bodies but now I throw the spouts one at a time because the bodies are all slightly different so each spout is slightly different to meet that teapot body and I use a blowtorch just to take the excess moisture away from the freshly thrown spout before I leather hard before I just very quickly and simply trim the tops over and then I have various kind of configurations for the lid loops or handles. To meet these sort of more abstract motifs that I'm working with in the bodies I start experimenting with making sort of lid handles that united with with those textures so I take those textures from the roulettes to the slab roller and then kind of look for shapes that are interesting. People often ask me what they are and I just say yeah whatever you want them to be really. I sometimes see windswept hawthorns and hazels of the Cornish coastline where I grew up. So when I'm making a batch of teapots I'll often make four or six where the bodies are complete in themselves but then I'll make the same number at the moment with a raised foot so the base is just trimmed and then I make a little doughnut of clay which is applied to the to make a foot and often that's also rouletted sometimes in harmony with the roulette of the body and sometimes not sometimes it's a contrasting texture to raise the foot up and then I'll often just lean the body of the pot back on the soft foot to make sure that the spout is just gently tilted backwards. Most of my handles are pulled in the fanacular style they're pulled a real tilt so you need to really tilt the teapot body over in order to find the spring as the handle comes out from the body of the pot and it's something that Ray Finch commented on while I was at Winchcombe in 1994 and Ray commented looking at a board of awful mug handles that it's like a good letter it's the inside shape that matters. Sometimes I'll then punctuate the outside surface of the handle with some little what are they divots or little butterflies they start out quite deeply textured but then I soften them back in. So we use a range of different salt slips in the workshop so these are composed from all clays and china clays of different kinds so it's the alumina silica ratio of those clays which is of interest really in their composition we might add a little bit of potash feldspar a little bit of naphthalene cyanide. So some of my pots they just have the slip on the outside and that's it so that's kind of one dimension of the kind of colours and surfaces that I'm using. The other side of it is a glazed surface with a porcelain slip underneath very often that'll be raw glazed and then once fired in our salt kiln. Our firings are once fired so we don't bisque fire our pots they just go all the way through. We get about 200 pots in our kilns about 40 cubic feet we preheat it the day before and then it gets fired for another 18 to 20 hours the following day and it's a big dimension to what we do the serendipity of the surfaces the actual enjoyment of the process it's a wonderful thing it's a really wonderful thing I love materials and processes. It's the contact with a material I suppose the softness of the clay my enjoyment of the process yeah trying to harmonize the artistic expression and the passion I have for the raw materials with my love of food is a really strong part of what I do.