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East London makers<br />
Image: Matthew Booth<br />
Gilded Finch bowls<br />
Christine Preisig meets local ceramicist Jo Davies<br />
Jo Davies's love of ceramics was<br />
kindled as a young teenager<br />
at school when she had the<br />
opportunity to work on a<br />
pottery project.<br />
The intensity of the work<br />
and the encouragement of<br />
the teacher changed her. “I<br />
just loved the material, its<br />
malleability and the fact that I<br />
could be so autonomous with<br />
just the hands as my tools,” she<br />
explains.<br />
Ceramic is a very complex<br />
material. There are different<br />
clays, many ways of firing it and<br />
that’s before you start to think<br />
about the glaze, where the<br />
possibilities are infinite. While<br />
studying in Bath and later at the<br />
Royal College of Art, she came<br />
to love those tricky elements of<br />
her craft.<br />
8 LOVEEAST<br />
A harder nut to crack for her<br />
was the fact that ceramic<br />
traditions, such as British studio<br />
ceramics, Stoke-on-Trent bone<br />
china or South East Asian<br />
traditions, seemed to weight<br />
heavily on what is seen as the<br />
right or wrong way to produce<br />
ceramics. Jo rebelled against<br />
that. She wanted to work more<br />
creatively, artistically – with a<br />
mind unclouded by traditional<br />
requirements.<br />
Jo comes from a sculptural point<br />
of view. “I wanted to be an artist<br />
– with a capital A – and was<br />
probably massively pretentious,”<br />
she says. Her earlier pottery<br />
work was mainly wall pieces,<br />
and nothing with a practical use.<br />
This changed during her time<br />
at the RCA when she started<br />
to focus on making functional<br />
ware. Vases are her favourite<br />
things to make. “They are nice<br />
sculptural vehicles that have a<br />
use – just about.”<br />
Over the years, Jo has<br />
developed a unique aesthetic<br />
that fuses simplicity with<br />
humorous details. She works<br />
exclusively in hand-thrown<br />
porcelain and sticks to her<br />
signature black and white glazes<br />
(with occasional gilded gold leaf<br />
details).<br />
It's fascinating to see how she<br />
morphs a basic piece of clay<br />
into a sophisticated object.<br />
Guided by Jo’s skillful hands,<br />
the clay on the throwing wheel<br />
takes the shape of a cone<br />
before it is transformed into a<br />
beehive and then opened up to<br />
give it a vessel shape.
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