Artisans of Dartmoor - Book - Page 135
THE POTTER
In a tiny tack room in a Georgian stable yard, Alison West crafts oneoff saggar-fired pieces bearing the organic imprints of foraged finds
L
ooking back, the writing was on the wall for
Alison West, even when she was a child. “I was
the family pyromaniac, who always wanted to light
the bonfires and candles,” she recalls, as she fills
her kiln with a freshly turned set of pots. “There
was a seam of clay in our garden which I was always
elbow-deep in, making thumb pots which I’d put in
the Aga to dry.”
Fifty years on, Alison still loves to light fires and
get her hands dirty – now as a potter who harvests
her materials from the Dartmoor countryside. “I
struggle to walk past a riverbank or ditch without
checking it for clay,” she says. “I roll mud into a thin
sausage, and if it wraps around my finger without
cracking, I can make a pot from it, or use it as a
‘slip’ to decorate other pots. Clay is essentially
just classy mud.”
Alison doesn’t just gather clay for her work.
Rarely a day goes by that she doesn’t punctuate
walking her dog, Nina, with the odd pause to slip
a piece of nature into her pocket. Ferns, dried
grasses, seed heads, mushrooms and frilly lichen
are among her tried-and-tested favourites. Their
destination? Alison’s kiln, where she wraps them
around her wild-clay pots to create beautiful,
fossil-like imprints.
Alison specialises in saggar firing, a technique
in which she puts her pottery in a metal container
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