Artist once asked Santa for a potter’s wheel
This is another in a series of articles profiling artists and artisans in the Otonabee Ward.
A member of the Kawartha Potters Guild, Melanie Horner has been playing with clay since she was a child. When she was five years old, she wrote to Santa Claus asking for a potter’s wheel!
“I was lucky to have a pottery studio at my comprehensive school where I grew up in England and that is where my passion for working on a wheel developed when I was 12,” says Horner. “I used to go to the pottery room at lunchtime to practice my throwing techniques.”
Horner attended a many classes over the years in various locations in England including ongoing night school classes, glaze workshops and raku workshops. She says that wherever she has lived, she has always found her way back to clay.
Horner works in low fire earthenware clay and uses mostly under-glazes for decoration as she likes the variety of techniques afforded by them and their vibrancy of colours against the white backdrop of the clay. She developed an interest in making clocks around 12 years ago and she has given many as wedding presents to friends and family. Now, she enjoys creating funky clock designs for children and adults alike and loves to take to commissions for personalised clocks. She has expanded her clock range to incorporate free-standing clocks for mantelpieces.
“My whacky designs are certainly ‘one of a kind’ pieces that take on their own little personalities as they emerge!” she says. “I like to have fun with my pottery and this comes through in my pieces. The yarn bowls are particularly fun to make. I add faces onto them to give them a character (and I have even made one with a Donald Trump face!) I also make tooth fairy pots, tiles and more recently raku pieces. Since I’ve been teaching more I enjoy more handbuilding work.”
In 2015, Horner directed a school project to make a commemorative mural in a school with more than 450 tiles which each of the children made. Collectively these made up the map of Canada in clay and plotted the Terry Fox Marathon of Hope route across Canada. She says that her knowledge of Canadian geography improved considerably after that project.
“I love to teach pottery to those of all ages, but especially children and seniors,” she says.
She regularly teaches in schools and hosts workshops in retirement homes in the community. She says that she measures her success by how much fun the participants have.
“The creativity of people who try pottery never ceases to amaze me. A class all starts off with the same materials, but the variations afterwards are incredible,” she says. “There is something so satisfying about starting with a ball of clay and creating something beautiful out of it.”
Her advice to budding potters is to keep an open mind and not to be too rigid about how you want your pieces to look.
“Pottery is a process that takes lots of practice, trial and error and failure to get to where you want to be,” she says. “A lot of times, improvisation and ingenuity are required to support a piece from raw clay to firing it and therefore flexibility and patience are needed. In this world of immediate results, pottery allows us to slow down, take the time to enjoy the process and be absorbed in it.”
Even though Horner pursued career in nursing, her interest in pottery never waned and she continued it as a hobby all her life. She worked as an Occupational Health Nurse in industry for 22 years. After her family moved to Canada in 2011, she found herself in trying to decide if she should spend two years retraining to get registered here or to pursue her passion for pottery.
“The pottery won and my business Firing Time was established in 2012 and I am as happy as a pig in mud!” she says.
The Kawartha Potters Guild gallery and retail store with handcrafted items from all of the guilds located in the building at 993 Talwood Dr., is open from Monday to Friday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, please call 705742-4979 or visit www.kawarthapottersguild.com.