My new-found passion for pottery changed my life

Clay’s primal allure is nothing new, but it’s something that artists, amateur crafters and anyone seeking a relaxing hobby to do with their hands seem particularly drawn to right now. 

The roaring success of The Great Pottery Throw Down (a record three million viewers tuned in for the finale of its sixth series earlier this year) can claim credit for inspiring a new generation of UK potting converts, with clay sales up by 40 per cent, pottery studios popping up all over the country and evening classes oversubscribed. 

Meanwhile, in Hollywood, Brad Pitt – a Throw Down devotee who speaks of clay’s therapeutic properties allowing him to “feel emotion in his fingertips” – has turned his lockdown hobby into a full-blown art practice. He exhibited hand-crafted ceramic candleholders and rough-hewn sculptures alongside works by artist Thomas Houseago and musician Nick Cave in Finland last year. 

Kendall Jenner is another high-profile pottery convert, who posts about taking throwing classes with her gal pals in Santa Monica. Generation Zers the world over can get their clay fix through hypnotically addictive #potterytok content on TikTok (#potterygirl creator Silk Cartwright has clocked up two million views for her “how to make a plant pot” video tutorial).

Midlifers, in particular, seem to be flocking to pottery studios, with fashion folks leading the way. Queen of French girl nonchalance Isabel Marant has come out as a pottery class keen bean. Fashion editor and influencer Deborah Brett (who regularly shares her crafty adventures on her instagram channel @deborahbrett), has started her own rather fabulous hand-thrown tableware line. Jeweller Monica Vinader, who commissioned potter Florence St George to design a line of bud vases and nesting dishes in uplifting colours to sell alongside her jewellery, says she is now getting the itch herself and “would love to give the wheel a go”.

Matilda Moreton, a potter and teacher at the London School of Mosaic, says pottery is not simply a craft but can be a very physical practice, too: “If you throw on a wheel, you have to centre yourself. It’s like yoga.” No wonder those who do it so often describe it as “grounding”.

“A surprising number of people who come to me for one-on-one classes start offloading what’s on their mind,” she adds. I’ve taught people who’ve been suffering things like domestic abuse, and they’ll talk about it when their hands are busy… they’re not necessarily looking at you, but they’re working alongside you and they start sharing what’s going on. Clay works in many ways, but there’s no doubt about how therapeutic it is.”

The following three pottery converts would undoubtedly agree.

Florence St George

‘A massive part of my healing has been finding this common ground through clay’

Model-turned-potter and author Florence St George was propelled into the public eye when she dated racing driver Jenson Button in her 20s, followed by a brief relationship with Prince Harry in 2011. After suffering postnatal depression after the birth of her first child, she turned to pottery to help herself heal. 

“When I was modelling and working in London, I didn’t feel particularly proud about modelling, for some reason. I didn’t feel that it was my calling,” says Florence St George in her home in Oxfordshire, where she and her husband Henry have recently relocated with their two children from their former home in the Bahamas. 

The potter, author and Great Pottery Throw Down alum explains that her anxieties began before the birth of her first child, Iris. “I had a couple of relationships that were in the public eye,” she says. “It was overwhelming because I was suddenly being looked at in a different way. The scrutiny was too much.” 

Of the postnatal depression and loneliness she suffered after the birth of her daughter, she explains: “You sort of lose a bit of your identity and there’s a certain amount of grief around that; definitely for me. There are moments when you are present with your little baby and you love them so much, and there are moments when you feel so alone.”

“Pottery was completely my healing,” she says of the craft she originally took up as a hobby as a young mother. “There’s always such a weird connotation around that word, but it’s an important thing – lots of us need our hobbies.

“From the first time I watched Throw Down, I started to copy what they were making – and I made little pinch pots, loads of them.”

Watching Throw Down encouraged Florence to reach out to contestant Freya Bramble-Carter (“She’s become my pal and we collaborate”); and inspired her to join the pottery studio of Freya’s father, Chris Bramble, where she found a community of fellow makers. “A massive part of my healing was the community that I found through the pottery studio; finding this common ground through clay,” she says. “I love being around other potters, because there’s little ego in pottery, as most of the time we are making functional things.”

Today, as she settles back into UK living, Florence’s creative life is full – whether she is foraging for clay in the fields around her house, collaborating with Monica Vinader on a range of ceramics, or dreaming up new projects.

Having taken a mini-sabbatical as the family relocates, she is itching to get back behind the wheel: “My son was off school last week and we sat and made little birds from air-dry clay. The moment I started kneading and making these birds, I could just feel the anxiety ebbing away. 

“I listen to therapy podcasts, I do quite a lot of work, because I am naturally potentially a depressive, so I have to work really hard at being ‘glass half full,’” she continues. “I believe by keeping my hands busy – not just busy, because busy can be an anaesthetic – but by keeping my hands moving and creating, I am happier, for sure.”

Keith Clapson

‘I learnt to touch again’

While being treated for extreme obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) at Bethlem Royal Hospital in 2017, Keith Clapson began making art as a patient in the hospital’s Anxiety Disorders Residential Unit (ADRU). ‘Touching the Surface’, his solo exhibition of ceramic sculptures made between 2017 and 2023, is on display at Bethlem Gallery until Nov 18.

“When I became an inpatient at Bethlem, I’d been signed off from working in the City, where I’d worked in a corporate law firm since I left school at 16. My OCD had got worse and worse over 19 years, and I ended up losing everything: my job, my home, my relationship – my boyfriend had become a carer, effectively,” says artist Keith Clapson, who shows me around a display of more than 100 glazed ceramic sculptures he has made over the past six years that effectively chart his recovery. “The treatment here is amazing; I left with a new life, able to do things that I hadn’t done in 20 years.” 

After a happy early childhood, Clapson explains that homophobic bullying at secondary school resulted in a fractured path through the school system, resulting in him leaving school without qualifications. Coming out as a teenager helped him find his community, but the devastating losses of friends due to Aids, at the tail-end of the darkest period of suffering from the condition, left a shattering impact. 

As his health deteriorated over a period of nearly 20 years, intrusive thoughts became increasingly debilitating. “I started getting paranoid about contamination… I didn’t feel in control of my own mind,” he explains. At his sickest, he says, “I couldn’t even touch my own mum.” 

His treatment in Bethlem’s ADRU combined medicine, intensive CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) and occupational therapy, where he found a release through art and was supported to build a portfolio that would allow him to apply to art school. A tutor on his foundation course at City Lit gave him the courage to embrace the clay and ceramic arts, encouraging his love of wild colour and introducing him to the “saggar” technique (firing pots within ceramic boxes in a kiln), which allowed him to experiment with found metal objects or broken vintage fragments inserted into the clay.

After his foundation course, he won a place to do the City Lit ceramics diploma in 2019, which, he says, provided a lifeline throughout the months of the pandemic: “I honestly believe that without ceramics I would not have maintained my recovery… I would have slipped back.” 

Clapson says he wanted the title of his solo show, Touching the Surface, to resonate on multiple levels. “I had learnt to touch again. There was so much joy for me in being discharged, about being able to do all the things I wanted to do. Using clay is all about touch; most of my work is hand-moulded.” He encourages visitors to the gallery to engage physically with the sculptures, even to pick them up. “I want to encourage other people to touch, because generally in a gallery it’s taboo.”

As for the future? “Being an artist is what I want to do, along with volunteering and mentoring at ADRU and sharing my story. I would love to develop this into a career of art therapy and occupational therapy.”

Vanessa Chen

‘Pottery has really centred me and my life’

Vanessa Chen worked as a financial lawyer in Japan, before taking a ceramics course that changed her life. After returning to Britain and becoming a mother to twins, she studied for a diploma in ceramics at City Lit. Her studio is at the London School of Mosaic in Camden.

“It’s been like a dream come true, really,” says Vanessa Chen, showing me around her zen-like studio, the shelves filled with meditative groupings of asymmetric porcelain vessels. “I was actually prohibited from taking art O-level by my parents, because it wasn’t academic,” she adds wryly.

As the child of an Asian immigrant family, she says there was an expectation that she would enter “the professions”. “I’m hugely generalising here… but certain professions were regarded as a good way of establishing yourself,” she says. 

After hopes that she might become a doctor were dashed, she travelled to Japan, where she fell in love with the culture, and found a training contract to study law. However, working as a lawyer in Japan was intense. Chen says, “I went into financial law, which is all transactions – if you have a deadline, you work all night.” 

It was a demanding and stressful life. And when, after eight years, she was made redundant, she decided to take a course in pottery, once a week for six weeks, while she figured out what she might do next. From that first pottery class it was love at first touch. “Pottery just unleashed something in me,” she says, smiling. The freedom she felt in the pottery studio was an impetus to find freedom in her own life. 

Returning to the UK, she took evening classes, before winning a place on the City Lit ceramics diploma course; though becoming a mother to twins meant taking “a bit of a pause”. When she was ready to wrap her head – and more to the point, her hands – around clay again, she headed to Chris Bramble’s studio in north west London, just as Florence St George had done. “He allows people to buy time at the studio. I started with one morning a week, then I did one day a week, and that’s how I came back.”

The beauty and ritual of ceramics in everyday life that Vanessa fell in love with in Japan remains a powerful influence on her work. “Pottery has really centred me and my life,” she says. “There’s more meaning and purpose, not just in [my] ceramics, but throughout my life.” 

The groupings of porcelain vessels that populate the shelves of her studio exert a powerful presence. “I throw very energetically and dynamically,” she continues. “I feel when I am throwing I am responding to the clay itself. It does have an intrinsic feeling and I need to express it. So it’s not just my way of controlling the clay, it is expressing. It’s like the clay has something to say and I allow it to be free.”