The studio.

The workshop is a converted barn at the bottom of the garden. It has one north-facing window above the wheel, a wood-burner in the corner that I light most mornings between October and April, and a long bench under the south wall where the pieces sit between stages. The roof is too low in one place — I've hit my head on it for twenty-seven years and I still hit it — and there's a swallow's nest in the eaves that comes back every spring. I've never had any wish to work anywhere else.

I came to clay slowly. I'd done other things — joinery for a while, a stretch of teaching, a long unhappy year in an office in London — and it was only in my late twenties that I sat down at a wheel for the first time. That was at an evening class in Wellingborough. The teacher was a woman called Margaret who'd been at Doulton in the sixties, and she put a lump of red clay in front of me and said almost nothing for the next hour. I went home that evening knowing what I was going to do with the rest of my life. It took another four years to make it happen.

The work I make is sgraffito. It's a simple idea: throw a pot in red earthenware, let it dry to the leather-hard stage, brush a coat of white liquid clay — slip — across the surface, and then, when the slip has set but isn't yet bone dry, scratch back through it with a fine tool to expose the red beneath. Everything that's white is slip; everything that's brown is the body of the pot showing through. There are no paints, no inks, no glazes involved in the drawing itself. Only the cut.

What this means in practice is that the drawing has to be right first time. You can fudge a line in pencil, you can paint over a mistake in oils. You can't unscratch slip. It either reads or it doesn't. I work with a fine pin tool — really just a sewing needle set into a wooden handle — and a small loop for the larger areas, and I draw straight onto the pot without much in the way of preparatory drawing. The letters I do plan; the flowers and bees I mostly don't.