JCBs and day-flying bats

It was the coldest, bleakest part of this last winter. That was when my right arm was gripped with such intense pain that I had to stop working with the clay. I was not happy! The medical advice was to take a break for a month, but what was I going to do?  It turned out that this was an opportunity to completely rethink my making process. 

All my forms up to this point had been made by honing them into shape using a metal scraper held in my right hand, and it was the tension in doing that that had led to the pain. I loved that process, and I felt that the gradual refinement of the firms over many days was part of what people perceived in them. I thought that, in some way, it was the source of their calmness and what they communicated. So to be deprived of access to that process was a challenge to what I had come to believe the work was about.

But my commitment is not to the outcome of the making process, it is to the process itself – to try to find a rightness in the making process and see what that quality leads to in the finished pieces. Clearly the scraping that I enjoyed was not right for my arm, so could there be a new way of making that would involve less tension and more balance in my body? 

For some reason I had also been reflecting on my early days of recording wildlife sounds which eventually led to my first career in natural history radio. Thinking back to the child who stuck a microphone out of his bedroom window to record the garden bird song I realised how long I have had a fascination with recording the natural world in one way or another. I was thinking how clay also keeps a record of everything that happens to it until it is fired, at which point the story of its making is locked into its form and surface. Maybe thinking of the clay as a recording medium could lead to a new way of working.  And so it did. 

 It’s been a week of arrivals and unexpected help.  Birds from Africa, bats from hibernation, carpenters from Tasmania, and machine tools from Milton Keynes.

On the nature front the land around the workshop is now full of migrant birdsong – sedge warblers on the reed bed, whitethroats on the gorse and wheatears among the grazing lambs – all delightfully bucolic.

bat over the yard_400

The most unexpected sighting was of a bat emerged from hibernation after our chilly spring.  He was feeding over the yard in broad daylight.  But, according to the client who has commissioned the first piece that will me made in this workshop (who just happens to be one of Britain’s leading bat experts) a hungry, newly emerged bat can’t necessarily wait for dark for his first meal of the year even if he risks becoming someone else’s dinner!

tasmanian help_400

Arriving from Tasmania last weekend were two university friends who now spend much of their time managing nature reserves on remote islands.  Fortunately for me, that means they are good at turning their hands to all sorts of things including carpentry.  So I now have have a workshop with insulated and lined walls and ceiling.  Thank you, Adam and Anna.

machines arrive_400

Finally I have to thank Levi Murphy, who is a JCB artist.  When the machine tools arrived from Felder in Milton Keynes it was immediately obvious that the driver and I didn’t have a hope of unloading them on our own.  But Levi, who was working in the yard that day, quietly and skillfully took them off the truck and slid them into the narrow entrance of the machine shop with a series of balletic maneuvers which included pirouetting the JCB using the back fork with £5K worth of table saw balanced on the front.  I then took a long lunch hour to settle my nerves.

machines in shop_400

So, thank you all.  Summer approaches and the workshop progresses.

This coming week it’s paint tins and floor sealing.

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