It's a pretty big thing to get your head around, isn’t it, a global pandemic? On an everyday scale we’ve all found new routines, some more welcome than others, but I’ve found it beyond me to really grasp the scale of parallel experiences that are being felt across human populations worldwide. Once we left casualty numbers in the hundreds they got too big for me to take in. I can only comprehend the impact of my own local situation, the empty town square and the cancelled markets, the queues for the pharmacies and deserted evening streets. I take on trust the pictures and reports I hear from everywhere else, and can relate to them as far as they compare to my own experience.
As far as that goes, life changed overnight for me, as it did for nearly everybody. My sociable weekly classes stopped, galleries closed and events and fairs started being cancelled in a staccato beat that became a crescendo in the first weeks. The comfortable humdrum of familiar daily life was lost in hurried adaptations to new routines with edgy undercurrents of anxiety and welcome relief from bursts of irrepressible, if not slightly hysterical humour.
So a few weeks have passed, the corners have been knocked off the new routines and many of us have had more time than we’re used to to reflect on where we are. I have spent the newly discovered hours finally getting around to building my website shop, with the aching guilt of not having done it years ago beginning to be blotted out by the satisfaction of seeing it realised, and - yes! - of attracting sales. Hooray! and Thankyou! if you are one of my new customers; you have cheered me immensely and I know the effort and sometimes frustration of learning something new has been worthwhile.
I have also been invited to make videos to demonstrate throwing techniques, and had a heartwarming and encouraging response to them from both potters and students, and people looking to see something a little different during their extended screen time. I’ve started off with a series on the stages of making and putting together a teapot. The positive feedback has helped to fill the social void scooped out by the cancellation of my workshops, and to make me feel that I’m still passing on details of time-worn learning of my own. This seems to be more of an imperative as I get older. There’s a long journey from one’s own training in a discipline to teaching it. Recognising the moment-to-moment micro-decisions that you make in real time is necessary before you can articulate them to an audience. I miss the immediate prompt of students’ questions, so it is a more reflective kind of demonstrating, but I found it less daunting than I anticipated and will continue to add to those I’ve done so far. You can see the videos by following me on Instagram and searching the IGTV button, or find them here:
At present I continue to cancel my one-day and short courses on a rolling basis; of course it’s disappointing, but in the grand scheme of things it is immaterial. I’m in the same position as most others, and luckier than many. I have a studio to work in, a garden to play in and, so far, have lost no-one to the disease which has changed everything including how we need to arrange our priorities, as well as our working routines, probably well into the future.
Of course I’m looking forward to welcoming potters back into my workshop, and sharing practical experience and knowledge face-to-face. All the same, there will, I hope, be changes that become permanent, changes that are long overdue, particularly in relation to how we exploit our resources and environment. The pressure of an immediate crisis has shown that we really can change our behaviours when we are sufficiently motivated.
We have rediscovered many of the benefits that those changes have brought, in an astonishingly short time: shouty birdsong, home-cooked food, less traffic and pollution, a better understanding of supply chains, increased awareness of local community and geography and a renewed appreciation of the things we queue to buy. They are some of the benefits that would follow from a rethink of how we tackle the more incremental crises of thoughtless consumerism; escalating waste; climate change. It will be a challenge to keep those benefits in view, as our reward for changing our attitudes and ingrained habits, as we emerge from our strange locked down spring. In the meantime, I’ll continue to adapt and search out ways to help enshrine another of the human treasures that we have rediscovered is central to all artists and makers, and vital to human happiness - the instinct of making, of skilled creativity, and of sharing it as broadly as we can.