Over New Year, we were lucky enough to spend three days out on Pen Caer, where I know a ditch that I can trim to collect some clay that makes a great throwing body and fires up to 1260 degrees C. The sun shone, wind blew, rain and sleet fell – four seasons in a day – or more like in an hour……

Clay horizon in the ditch…

Foam on Newport beach.

Stream..

I am enormously grateful to Alan Ault (junior) and the team at Valentine’s Clays (Stoke on Trent), for showing me around the factory and taking me through:

• the stages involved in the production of their terracotta, stoneware and porcelain clays
• the sources of their raw materials.

I am particularly interested in finding a source of clays that are local to me that I can buy commercially. This would be in addition to my practice of collecting small quantities of clay by hand for projects that explore their properties for throwing / making and glazing.

Beautiful old filter press at Valentines Clays in Stoke

I have really enjoyed working with the clay from Clee Hill over the summer and making a range of glazes from the locally named Dhu Stone (dhu meaning black in Welsh, this is an olivine basalt rather than dolerite as I have said before) mixed with the local clay, wood ash and small quantities of quartz (to help produce a more glassy glaze). I have also wanted to represent the copper seams running beneath the Shropshire Hills, and have used a zircon silicate white glaze with 2% copper carbonate to help give a band around the external rim to represent these layers. I have loved working in this amazing landscape and will be increasingly representing this connection and fascination through my photographs and drawings:

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I have entered some of the small cups / bowls made using Clee Hill clays and glaze materials as part of my response to the Holburne Museum collection (wanting to represent the beautiful simple Middle Eastern drinking cups referred to by Omar Khayyam in the Ruba’iyat). Here is one that went to the shop for sale along with a postcard of the photographs shown above.

It’s been the usual descent into summer’s competing priorities: family holidays, working on the house (exterior wall and windows) and trying to keep up with my ceramic work. I have been lucky enough to have found a chance to re-visit my friends up on Clee Hill, to dig some more clay. I’m also very grateful to the kind people at Hansen Quarries up on Titterstone Clee Hill for giving me a small bucket of “dust” to experiment with from their Dolerite quarry. Unfortunately, due to health and safety restrictions, I’m not allowed to go and collect this myself – but they gave me a small sample from their finest grade aggregate and I washed the dust out through a 100 sieve.

It’s been great. The Clee Hill clay fires to an amazing purple / red at 1260 degrees C in my electric kiln (oxidising), and the glazes I have made with the quarry dust, local clay and wood ash (mixed 33% evenly) have produced a beautiful, glassy black (where thick) breaking to brown “tenmoku” like glaze that works well with the clay. Other glazes I experimented with have crawled, flaked and pin-holed – especially as I make the move away from double firing (i.e. bisc and glaze) to single firing. The Clee Hill Glaze works well with no additives etc. – which is great. To set off the two colours, I have researched which other minerals were dug over Clee Hill and found that copper seams run through the hills amazing mix of dolerite, limestone, coal…. etc. I have used a zircon silicate base glaze (that I have used a lot from Stephen Murfitt’s invaluable Glaze Book) with 2% added copper carbonate to create a turquoise that seems to work well…..

Clee Hill clay bowls drying alongside cups and test tiles fired to 1260 degrees….

Clee Hill bowl with Clee Hill 33% glaze made of local materials and a turquoise copper glaze…..