As I was watching Edmund De Waal on the BBC show, “What do artists do all day” , a line by him struck me like a bolt of lightening. He said that he had to make things. This imperative to create, to make, to bring into existence is the stuff of life. It hit me hard as those words put into existence the very battle of my day-to-day emotions on fulfilment and purpose. The past years that have gone by where I have finished days without any tangible produce of the day have had a huge toll on my well-being. My life only seems to slip by when nothing is formed for the time spent, no memories, no creation to complement my thoughts and on rare occasions no thoughts at all. Those were hard days.

Potturnica Pottery grew from the ground like a wild flower. A seed of wanting to make things that was part of me no matter where I went. And after years of paper pushing I slowly recognised the deep unsettling irony of “career success”. The better the paper pushing activity got the more empty I felt. It was a sort of see-saw. I remember clearly the day I picked up some Play-doh on my way out on a regular supermarket trip and came home and simply handling the pliable little blob of colour brought back cheer and positivity to my evening. Those were the beginning of my Play-doh days!

Since the past 7-8 years I have had Play-Doh in my drawers at my desk at work, at my desk at home and sometimes even in my handbag on trains and buses. I simply enjoyed creating little creatures, naming them, giving them a purpose in my so called “village life”. How quaint you might think. But it was so powerful and revealing of my thoughts and motivations that at times I was taken aback and at times pleasantly surprised at the leaps in creative thoughts I would amass simply by making alien like creatures. They were really me you know. But they were also something else… a part of me that I refused to acknowledge then. I was and am a Maker. I think when I create I am not merely “creative” in the colloquial sense of the word but I am in the linguistic sense of the word. What is even more powerful is knowing that I can’t be anyone else. I have a duty to make things, because without that I am not me.

Potturnica Pottery is that promise, that imperative to make things, where I can simply be me without fear or favour.