The beauty of broken things

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve made a new journal post - honestly - it’s been tricky, but I won’t dwell on it and all the negative things Covid-19 has brought us this past year. Instead, I wanted this post to be about something else - about finding salvation and beauty in broken or redundant things and what we can learn from these objects.

I think this past year has realigned many of our ‘ethical compasses’, we realise the state our planet is in and want to do our small part to tread lightly on the world, to consume less. For us, this has been about really questioning what we make, what we put it into the world, whether it is wanted and whether it is worthy of the materials we use to make it - because even hand made small batch ceramics has a cost.

But what happens when, despite your best efforts, things don’t go to plan and pieces aren’t perfect? We do smash pots, and I know people hate hearing that. But we’re really trying to do that less and only if we really don’t want that piece to exist in world. Last year we decided to have special online seconds and sample sales and they proved to be really popular so we will continue to run these when we can. But sometimes things go really wild in the kiln and the pieces are rendered non-functional. At the beginning of 2020 we took part in a group wood-firing at the Sheffield Manor Kiln. Unfortunately a fellow potter’s work exploded and the debris of which landed in many of our pieces. It’s just part and parcel of firing collectively and also firing in a less straightforward kiln, so we weren’t upset, but I didn’t know what to do with the pots. They had a sculptural beauty and a story to tell, so I popped them on a shelf and then kind of forgot about them. But in October India Hobson and Magnus Edmondson came to the studio to photograph our work. The resulting photographs are beautiful, but to my surprise and delight they had decided to photograph some of the exploded wood-fired pots too.

Seeing the broken wood-fired pieces documented in this way, literally through another lens, has led me to think about non-functional work, about ideas in which to display objects like these, but also, on a wider level it has made me think about objects that are broken or redundant and how we can mend them, or if not, at least appreciate a poetic beauty which can’t always be so prevalent in our functional work.