Isatu Hyde,
Shropshire potter Isatu Hyde is helping to keep traditional rural skills alive, thanks to her apprenticeship in the ancient art of stoneware
“I kept thinking about being a potter. I just wanted to make... It’s about what you bring to it. A well-made pot truly expresses the potter.”
Black smoke would have once filled
Corvedale valley in the Shropshire
Hills. Centuries ago, the land was mined for coal and ironstone and smelted in blast furnaces. Today, nature has reclaimed the landscape and all is green, quiet and clear.
But in these deep folds beneath Wenlock Edge and the Clee Hills, a blaze still burns. It rages in the kiln belonging to potter Isatu Hyde as she fires her latest pottery, and it lights up her very being, her passion for her craft running deep. “From day one I fell in love with it,” she says. “I’ve done something related to pottery every day since.”
Isatu has a quiet demeanour and speaks softly and eloquently but it is clear she has a tenacity about her. She has spent the past 10 years learning the art of throwing pots from Andrew Crouch of The Marches Pottery in Ludlow, and this year has taken on her own workshop and studio and branched out alone. “I’m very excited to have my own space, to really explore things that interest me the most,” she says.
Isatu began learning from Andrew when she was 19. She had started a degree in architecture in London but didn’t get along with it – “I wanted to be more hands-on” – so her mum suggested asking if Andrew would take her on for work experience. Isatu instantly took to pottery and left London after a year. She began studying design at Falmouth University and, while she was in Cornwall, she worked with Jack Doherty at The Leach Pottery, returning to Shropshire to work for Andrew during her summer holidays.
“I was immediately drawn to the material. I was throwing and making and glazing and firing,” she says. She became his apprentice in 2013, supported in the first year with funding from crafts charity the Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust (QEST) and Heritage Crafts Association, and she has never looked back. “I love the feel of clay,” she says. “The beauty of it. Turning a lump of clay into something. The way your hands move and the stillness required.”
Andrew taught Isatu in the traditional way, which involved rigorous training in throwing and concentrating on form to develop a disciplined approach to making.
“His principles of design are embedded in my making,” says Isatu. “I feel incredibly grateful to have been let into his world. It was intense at times, but it’s been a joy. I couldn’t have found a better teacher for me. He has trained me to have a critical eye. He encourages me to look very closely at the lines and forms I make.”
Arriving at Isatu’s new studio in the middle of the countryside on the road to Much Wenlock, you might think you have stumbled on an abandoned farmyard. A straw-strewn barn stands empty and mud squelches underfoot, but enter the old stone farm buildings and you’ll find Isatu working in a converted calf pen, her furniture-maker husband Kai VenusDemetrio planing an oak desk next door, the earthy scent of raw clay mingling with fresh sawdust and damp stone. Around the studio sit bags of clay, a pug machine (for recycling scraps of clay), her kiln, a table for wedging (kneading the clay), and a standing and a sitting wheel.
Isatu’s sitting wheel faces a window on to a field where horses graze. The light picks up speckles in the clay of some of her freshly baked bread cloches next to eight beautiful identical bowls waiting to be glazed. “I like to be in the
ABOVE Andrew Crouch of The Marches Pottery
OPPOSITE
Isatu weighs the clay, to measure the right amount for the size of pot she wants to make
She shapes the damp red clay into a ball, ready to be thrown on the wheel
Ribs are small tools used to trim, smooth, curve or straighten clay
Making a hole in the centre, Isatu moulds the clay as the wheel spins
The clay starts to take shape – it will form the base of a bread cloche