For the last few years one of the main influences on my making has been the need to work with rather than against creative constraints, most of which are to do with the age and health of my body and the natural ebb and flow in my creativity energy, and let them be my guides rather than my enemies. That’s quite a change from the younger me who took pride in envisaging a creative outcome and letting nothing stand in the way of achieving it.  

This collaboration with life and loosening of control has not only proved to be more sustainable at a personal level, but it has also led to a whole new aesthetic in the work.  Since we live in an age when the consequences of our actions for the planet and the other species with which we share it are now starkly apparent I’ve been wondering what aesthetic would emerge if I were to fully embrace the need for environmental and ethical sustainability in my work in the same way, and to treat these too as creative constraints that might lead to interesting outcomes.

It is the norm these days to use quarried, mined and synthesised clays and glaze ingredients shipped all round the world with little regard for their origins and the environmental and human costs of producing them.  It’s the ceramic equivalent of ultra-processed, convenience food.  And then there’s the energy consumption, not only in the acquisition, transport and processing of raw ingredients, but also in the firing of work. The aesthetic of wood-fired and gas-fired ceramics with the chemical conditions that they produce and the romantic role of happenstance inside the kiln are often prized and promoted as the epitome of ceramic art, but both create local pollution and release greenhouse gases, and I wonder if they now need to be seen as an aesthetic from a previous age, like the extravagant and elegant gas guzzling cars of the early combustion engine age.

The pollution from wood and gas firing can be reduced with more efficient firing regimes and mitigated through tree planting, but it can also be avoided completely by using solar or wind-powered electric kilns.  There’s no flame, no fun and no glamour in an electric kiln, but if moving to renewable electric firing is a contemporary creative constraint where might it lead aesthetically?

I have already shifted from synthesised stoneware clays, whose ingredients are imported and which require higher firing temperatures, to earthenware clays from the English Midlands that can be fired lower.  I fire in an electric kiln using renewable electricity, and I’ve been exploring texture and simple base metal oxides to create my surfaces rather than relying on glazes made from multiple mined ingredients.  But what if I could reduce the firing and the need for mined and shipped ingredients still further?

Smoke firing is technique that can produce beautiful surfaces on unglazed pots.  It’s carried out as a second, decorative firing and effectively embeds carbon from the smoke into the porous pot surface. I’ve tried it.  It’s fun and smokey, not great for the lungs or the neighbours, but uses less wood than a wood fired kiln and no fossil fuels.  The smoked surfaces are often waxed afterwards to bring out their colour, so I wondered whether I could skip the smoke and put the carbon into the wax.