We celebrated 34 years of marriage last week at a beautiful restaurant near a ruined castle, near to our home. How lucky are we? We have worked together in our marriage, as parents and for eight years as partners in seatree and all it brings. How life has had its ups and downs and sideways moves too. Working together is interesting. We take it for granted now probably that we are both at home and can be flexible and have time with family when needed or work in the garden or head into the hills for a walk. We know how lucky we are though when we take these moments to stop and reflect – and we are grateful too for your support, being here!

We are a small business, officially just the two of us. However, there’s so much more behind the scenes.

Business Gateway are available for training and chats from beginning through development through to big stuff like exporting.

The Design Trust are amazing in their insights into creative businesses, wonderful monthly updates and courses you can sign up to.

Friends are amazing – encouraging us at the beginning and buying our work when it was early days, and keeping going with their shares and likes.

Family – so wonderful. Not just looking after us when we’re tired but also sharing skills – both pottery and technical, and also photography and social media.

Shops and galleries – so supportive, not just in sales but in promotion, encouragement, customer engagement. Some have been our allies for years.

Event organisers – they do such a tremendous job!

and you…

Thank you for reading! Thank you for taking part in what we do. For sharing, liking, buying what we make. Turning up at our events and fairs. Taking an interest in what we do.

We really wouldn’t be able to do this on our own..

We are very excited to  be finalyl able to make our big announcement!

Over the last few months, we have been working on a new collection of ceramics, which we are calling ‘seatree elemental’.  This collection takes a brand new direction, whilst still retaining a lot of what we love about our work.

‘Seatree elemental’ refers to a range of ceramics using rough clays and alternative firing techniques, such as pit firing or raku firing. All pieces are hand built and unique, each one is different and one-of-a-kind.

Although they utilise original poetry – just like other seatree work – you may have to work harder to read it, as we are  sometimes happy to let the words be absorbed into the piece itself, as if they form part of the fabric. In this way we try to allow the different firing methods to shape the words too.

Why are we doing this?

Well, it was necessary for our work to grow, to experiment and find new expression. Chris in particular loves the new rough clay, as it offers many redeeming features in its plasticity and drying qualities. He is also loving the alternative firings, and how the organic shapes of the new work are transformed by the elemental nature of fire and heat, as if emerging from the very place they (and we) are planted.

Much of this process is rather hit-and-miss, with as many failures as successes. Partly this is because of our learning curve (which shows no sign of levelling off!) but also the very nature of firing large pieces like this one is challenging!

The poems chosen for seatree elemental are often more challenging in nature, as this work has emerged as a way for us to explore our relationship to all that is broken and all that is beautiful in this world shadowed by climate injustice. Just like our other work, you will see a colour spectrum inspired by the wild western fringe of Scotland.

A lot of these pieces use a firing process known as raku (which our Japan-based friend tells us means ‘easy’ in Japanese – something we feel might be intended as irony!) Raku is a process by which a pot is heated quickly to around 1000 degrees using a gas burner, then it is placed in a reduction bin (a sealed metal bin containing combustable material.) By controlling the amount of oxygen reaching the glazes, the potter can produce a range of different colours  (although much of this is also down to chance for relative beginners such as ourselves.)

We mentioned earlier that this work is in part a response to climate change and mass extinction, and we hope to pull together an exhibition of our work in the future, but for now, we have uploaded a small selection of our work in to our shop, which you can see here. 

Here are a few more images of recent seatree elemental work. Most are not in our shop, but if you see something you like, feel free to drop us a line…

(You can click to enlarge.)

Over the last few months, we have been working on a different range of ceramics. This has involved lots of experiments, with the inevitable successes and failures that always come with working with new forms of ceramics.

I say ‘we’, but this has been a project mostly followed by Chris, with our son-in-law James as a co-conspirator. Michaela has been busy with other things, and also has a sensory objection to the heavily grogged clay that these new experiments havedemanded.

We are almost at the point of floating some of this new work, alongside other seatree pieces, in the form of ‘seatree elemental’

The point here was not only to push out into something new, but also to respond in a different way to our environment, our location and to overarching concerns about social and climate justice. The partnership with James has been important, as he is an oceanographer, spending time in the arctic doing research on melting ice. This has led him through dark places, but also into making his own art in response to the experience. Check out his website here.

Seatree elemental looks different from other seatree work because the process is very different. Using grogged or raku clays, which give much greater thermal shock protection, these pieces are typically pit-fired or raku glazed. Most still use our own poetry, but the themes of these poems are likely to be darker and used in a way that is much more ephemeral.

Here is a sneak preview of some of the new work- hopefully coming to the website shop soon!

This week marked the first dive into the use of AI for seatree argyll. Emily discovered a wonderful app (is it an app?) that you can use to stage photographs – not just the ones where you pick a setting and struggle to ,make your picture fit in, but one where you describe what you would like – a sandy, rocky beach on a stormy day, or coffee and candlelight in soft colours.. whatever works for your object! The end result is so natural and even has shadows and reflections – it’s truly amazing! It means of course that you can’t be sure when you see anything, or anyone, that they are where they say they are – she set up a picture of baby Robert playing the bodhran at a rock concert!  Is it cheating? We don’t think so – it just a useful tool for showing off our work. I think the website looks so much more professional than it did and I am very grateful to Emily, Chris and James for all their efforts this last two weeks in making it happen!