Karen Syrett
There are endless possibilities when working with clay and although I rarely manage to create a thing of beauty, I have enormous fun trying! I love learning new techniques and then playing around with them to see what happens. Most of them go wrong but I learn so much from having a go.
I became interested in ceramics a few years ago when my workplace received a few contemporary pieces to compliment it’s display of modern paintings. As I handled these works, I thought wow, how on earth are these pots made? A colleague told me that Morley College ran ceramics classes so I enrolled on a Saturday taster course, and that was it! I was hooked. Since those first sessions I’ve explored hand-building, throwing and even Raku and love them all. The tutors at Morley are fantastically supportive and encouraging and the facilities are amazing. Seeing what the other students get up to is another source of inspiration – everyone is very collaborative.
Recently I have been combining thrown elements with hand-built ones to build bigger and more complex vessels. As these objects are all about form, I’ve kept the glazing simple but next term I want to keep the form simple and experiment instead on a variety of decorative techniques – as I said there are so many possibilities. Unlike mugs and bowls my pieces don’t tend to be very useful but they are always fun to make. I am looking forward to doing some more Raku in the summer – this is a very exciting course with unpredictable results, so it suits my experimental nature perfectly.
Although my efforts don’t come close to those ceramic pieces I handled at work, sometimes I manage to surprise myself and end up with something quite decent. But for me, it’s not really about the end product, I just enjoy the journey.
