Meet Hilda

I started a ceramics course one rainy Saturday in November and I was hooked straight away.

When everything else in life is so hectic—when we only feel productive if we’ve managed to cross twenty things off our to-do list—pottery for me was the antidote. There is something so calmingly simple about taking a lump of earth and slowly shaping it with your hands into something beautiful. The process of carving into clay has a definite meditative quality: it’s slow, it’s measured, and it requires your full attention. It appeals to me as much for the aesthetic that it gives to a piece as the pleasure that I get from making it.

I remember, at one of my first pottery classes, spending the majority of the lesson hunched over a workbench with a clay bowl in front of me, slowly but carefully carving an intricate texture into the surface. I found the process so absorbing that when I stepped out of the studio at the end of the lesson and into the fresh air, it literally felt like I was landing back on planet Earth; it was as if for a couple of hours at least I could forget everything else.

I hope the projects in this book inspire you to create your own carved pieces and that the techniques, and the results they produce, bring as much joy to you as they do to me.