Made in England
Tregear Pottery on the Isle of Wight
THERE’S a flavour of summer and the sea in Neil Tregear’s pottery – it’s as if the bowls, jugs, mugs and plates have been hewn from our underwater landscape. Shoals of fish circulate, all greys and bluey greens; lobster, crab and seagulls adorn the various stoneware pieces, which are simple, natural and very beautiful.
Tregear Pottery is on the Isle of Wight in the small, picturesque village of Niton, near Ventnor. It’s a twominute drive to the glittering sea and it’s not difficult to see how this small island and its coastline inspires the work. Walk through the door of this former butcher’s shop and the evocative smell of clay is in the air.
The interior is tidy, with finished pots displayed on white, cube-shaped shelves. Ceramic planters filled with houseplants hang from rails in the front windows, and the former meat fridge halfway up the workshop is very effective as a store for pottery at the leather-hard “greenware” phase of the process. Neil’s wheel is near the window and he’s often there working.
This is Neil’s second career in ceramics, his first having been in the 1980s. He moved to the island in the Noughties with his wife, Catherine, to a house which – what are the chances of this? – actually had a pottery kiln in the garage! Although working in education at the time, his evenings spent at the wheel were a reminder of his earlier days and his passion.
Neil’s family moved to San Francisco from England when he was in his teens.
“My dad was a scientist and my elder brother was really clever at maths. Dad thought I was going to be a civil engineer and I probably would have been if we’d stayed in England. But we spent a year in California and we went everywhere and, somewhere in the back of my mind, I changed from wanting to be an engineer to wanting to be an artist. When I discovered clay at school, again in America, I found what I was looking for.”
When the family returned to England Neil did a foundation art course, then a degree in ceramic design, which mixed traditional pottery techniques with industrial design. He then pursued a full apprenticeship in the porcelain industry in Kyoto in Japan in the early 1980s, which lasted for a year.
“That gave me two things. Firstly, a very deep understanding of aesthetic in terms of shape, profile and form. It also gave me an incredible manual skill because I was throwing hundreds of little porcelain bowls six days a week for months on end.”
On his return to England, Neil met Deborah Sears, a designer establishing a company called Isis Ceramics. She was looking for a potter. Isis produced (and still does) high-end pottery that evokes the spirit of the 17th and 18th century, particularly Delftware.
“I suppose that’s what completely refined my skill. My entire livelihood depended on the quality. We were supplying just about every big name there was, both here and in the States. However, the drawback was that what I was making was being defined by somebody else. In fact, defined by what was in a museum. If we made a ginger jar, it needed to look exactly like a 17th-century ginger jar.
“But I learned a fantastic set of commercial skills. About dealing with department stores and, most of all, about quality control and that quality and consistency was everything – and that deadlines matter, of course.”
There followed six years of hard work. When times slowed a little, Neil decided to retrain as a teacher.
“Once I’d gone into teaching, I thought it was a one-way ticket and I wouldn’t get the opportunity to do anything like pottery again. It wasn’t until I came here I realised that it could happen.”
Neil and Catherine moved to the
Isle of Wight in 2003. What started as a hobby in the garage grew into a business as the couple experimented with shapes, colours and designs. Neil had been to a Picasso exhibition in Leicester which showed a video of the artist cutting out leaf shapes to decorate his pottery. Inspired by the
sea and Picasso’s methods, Neil started with his own drawings.
From his drawings, he would cut out shapes to apply to his pots. His first design was Whitebait.
“I wanted to produce something in a ceramic that created a baitball and not much else. It’s when the fish circle very tightly to protect themselves from predators. I realised the thing that I’m looking for is the patterns that animals make when they’re moving en masse, of which the whitebait was almost the simplest to achieve.”
While the technique might seem straightforward, it is complicated. The fish, which are drawn on to paper and snipped out, are then applied to leather-hard clay. The glaze and a slip is applied on top. These dry, then the paper fish are removed leaving their pattern in relief. Then the pieces are over-fired to get a glossy white appearance. It took hundreds of samples to get the first piece in the watery hues redolent of the shore.
“I played around with traditional recipes for coloured slips, but completely changing the proportions of the metal oxides inside them. Then I would try various different glazes overlaid on top at different temperatures to see if I could get this balance of colour and contrast. When I got just a little bit of what I wanted, I discarded the rest and concentrated on refining – working out exactly how much iron, opal or tin was needed.”
Once this technique had been mastered, Neil worked on the different patterns. Seagulls in flight was the next design. This being the coast, a lobster was next, followed by crabs. Sailing boats, Arctic tern, butterflies and hares have all been added to the repertoire of patterns. He has tried birch trees in a forest and even the delicate flower balls of allium. When I was there, in January, he was working on a design of a penguin which was to make its debut at the Birmingham Spring Fair in February.
Initially displayed in art galleries and exhibitions on the island and the mainland, the pottery was well received and the couple built a fledgling business, with galleries re-ordering new pieces from them.
When the butcher’s shop building became available, Catherine seized the opportunity in 2012, starting with the front half of the building and over the subsequent years expanded into the back of the building. As the company grew they took over a semi-derelict studio on the side.
One of their early breakthroughs came at The Country Living show in
London, where not only did Tregear win an award for the best newcomer, but part of that prize was also a feature in the magazine, which exposed the pottery to a wider audience. And now, of course, it’s possible to show the work online and spread the word through social media.
“I think one of the incredible things for me going back into pottery in the twenty-first century was the ease with which you could communicate images and move things around. It transforms the way you can work, really.”
The pottery expanded and the team grew. People began to seek out
Tregear when they came to the island on holiday. Productivity increased by using a laser-cutter instead of cutting paper patterns by hand. This also meant that more complex designs could be produced.
“In some respects, you’d be crazy to choose this place as a pottery. In other respects it’s perfect because now we can use the internet to communicate the fact that our work so closely identifies with our location on the island,” he explains.
As we met pre coronavirus, there had been many exciting plans for the year ahead. Tregear had been working to supply a couple of the island’s top restaurants with pottery. The Smoking Lobster had served their water in lobster-embellished water jugs last year and plans are afoot to expand this to a couple of other restaurants.
“It’s worked really well for both of us. The jugs are completely unique for the restaurant,” Neil told me. “The customers, because it’s a really good seafood restaurant, just associate the jug with their wonderful meal and two days later come round here and buy a jug.”
Plans were also afoot to experiment with terracotta versions of pottery and fledgling enquiries from museums were in the offing.
This is one of our great small English businesses and we just hope that over the next few months things will get back to normal for them.