Just pottering about

Inspired by wedding bouquets, native breeds and countryside walks, it is imaginative reinterpretations of past designs that give today’s regional potteries their distinctive identities, says Matthew Dennison

- Matthew Dennison

POTTERY, my mother told me, is the closest thing to farming,’ remembers Tabby Cole. ‘It’s very natural and its results are dependent on the quality of your ingredients. Those ingredients emerge from the earth—in our case, now that a local seam of clay in the riverbed is no longer workable, we use clay from Cornwall, processed in Stoke-on-Trent.’

Miss Cole runs Rye Pottery, based in the East Sussex cinque port, with her brother Josh. The family has owned the pottery since 1947, when, in a burst of post-war optimism, the siblings’ grandfather Wally bought it with his brother, Jack, and set about employing small-scale industrial techniques to make studio pottery affordable. They were inspired by the keeper of ceramics at the V&A Museum, W. B. Honey, and, in Wally’s case, by his wartime experience working alongside distinguished, forward-thinking figures in the art world, including printmaker Julian Trevelyan and architect Basil Spence, at the Camouflage Development and Training Centre at Farnham Castle, Surrey. During the early years of Cole-family ownership, Rye Pottery’s output embraced a distinctive mid-century aesthetic, producing striped tablewares that garnered an international following and remain in production today.