We made this bowl recently and I was struck by how familiar the colours were. Here you can see the image alongside, of the shoreline by our house. Isn’t it beautiful. Chris didn’t go down to the shore and choose the glaze colours. It’s more like we just have soaked in the colours here and they flow out of us into the work we do. I’ve often wondered what our work would look like if we lived in the city….

We love the work of our friend and fellow artist Si Smith whose work is based in his home city of Leeds – people, architecture, the ways people travel through life.

I guess ours is the lines in the sand, the tidal pools, the spirituality of the wild places.

Both have such value. The connection to our land, to the place, to the people we are surrounded by, the conversations, the hopes, the dilemmas..

The colours here are so beautiful. Soft, grey, clear. They still the soul and you can rest in them. Although our work is not fundamentally about the Cowal Peninsula, or even Argyll, the very being of it seeps through into what we do together – the words and the shape and form and colour.

I (Michaela) started making ceramic brooches some time ago, original using the circle cut out of the base of bowls, like the middle of a doughnut. I love detail and making small things and the space these small discs provided for adding one word and a small sketch was delightful. Many were made – but few were sold. I had bought some sustainable jewellery boxes which were black, to help the brooch ‘pop’ and put a coordinating colour inside the box and a seatree label on the lid. But few sold, whether in shops or at fairs or online. I was quite disheartened as I loved making them so much.

Roll on a few months and the sudden brainwave that maybe it wasn’t the brooches but the packaging. Maybe black jewellery boxes indicate elegant rather than quirky? So I ordered some brown kraft card brooch display cards, adapted the seatree stamp we use for the bags at fairs and used the letters stamps that are used on the clay, to write ‘wearable art’ along the top.

And now they sell! Online, at fairs and we received a wholesale order for a shop at Loch Lomond!

It’s all about the packaging…

 

Recently, I was mentoring a potter who told me that the person he was learning from had told him not to bother with exhibitions as it cost too much money. This isn’t true. Obviously, you can choose to hire a space and pay for advertising and hope people come. but mostly, you work with a gallery who curates an exhibition you have been invited to do or applied for. It made me think about how the first things you hear stick, as if they are the fundamental truth.

I was told when I started pottery that clay fresh from the bag did not need wedging. Follow on, years of pots cracking while drying…

I added a cloth above them and wrapped them in plastic. Cracked.

I dried them in a box to avoid draughts. Cracked.

I only used fresh clay to make sure it had all the fine particles in. Cracked.

I added epsom salts. Cracked.

I made them the same width all the way up instead of narrow at the top. Cracked.

I dried them upside down. And the right way up. Cracked.

I made them while the clay was softer. Cracked.

I tried new clays. Cracked.

Eventually, the clay provider (the wonderful Commercial Clays in Stoke-on-Trent) said, You are wedging the clay, aren’t you? Well yes, if I’ve recycled it…

It turns out that in the seventies, when clay started being de-aired and piped into bags, rumour spread that the clay no longer needed wedging. It was an older potter that told me this too. But it is wrong. The clay still has layers in it and the molecules need stirring up. I don’t have the scientific words. Just the relief…

Here at seatree, we have always tried to make art that not only responds to our context, but also digs into the grist of things. Both of us have a background working amongst excluded groups of people and feel passionate about social justice. At the same time, our decision to live and work through our creative practice was a deliberate attempt at a more sustainable lifestyle, more connected to the earth in all its beauty and brokenness. These two great justice movements- social and economic- can be seen throughout our work.

There are many dangers in making this kind of art. Firstly, it is easy to get all preachy and self righteous, so as to end up making a kind of woke propaganda.

There is also the problem of crisis trauma. Michaela read a post on FB the other day which said something like this “My desire to stay well informed about world events is fundamentally at odds with my desire to stay sane’. In other words, making art about justice issues may wear you down, even to the point of trauma.

Our son–in-law, who is also a ceramicist, spent years as an oceanographer, working in the arctic, trying to understand why the ice was melting much quicker than expected. In the end, it was making him ill. For him, the art he makes out of these experiences is healing, but staying in that place of protest can be exhausting for others.

Why do we do it then?

For us, the answer is simple. We must. In sesking to live well in a world that has so much darkness just now, we feel that we have to try to push towards something better, something more loving and more hopeful. The only way we can do this is through art- our pottery and our poetry.

In this way, art becomes a way of engaging – a way to connect with our times and context that gives some protective distance and allows room for making our objection to injustice.

Of course, with seatree pieces, it is always the poetry that comes first, and there are many poems that have never found their way onto the clay. We thought we would share one of them here.

It was written whilst Chris was working as a social worker, with families who were struggling. Beautiful children whose prospects were bleak. A societal response that seemed entirely inadequate.  This poems trys to say all of those things, whilst at the same time saying none of them.

 

Welfare State

 

The sofa split some years ago

The gas fire hisses as if

through broken teeth.

Colin tries to stir up hope

On the Baby Belling, whilst the TV screen sucks

the kids in like flecks of dust.

 

A manufactured crisis for some pop star wannabe

Stabs out from the fat old tube.

The crowd scream – no wonder.

And Colin stares into the tangled noodles wondering

What might become of the children

For not one of them can sing.

 

But their faces, lit by cathode light

Are beautiful.