The Americans are always the quickest, followed by the Europeans and then the British. Time zones may be part of the reason, explains the London-based potter and social media sensation Florian Gadsby, who holds thrice- yearly pottery sales online, which go live at 7pm on a Sunday evening. His most recent sale sold out within a frenzied five minutes and 11 seconds. I know, I was bathing my children and unwisely took Gadsby at his modest “my pots sell quite quickly” word.
More fool me given his Instagram reach of 790,000 followers with a combined following on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, Threads, Facebook and Bilibili in the region of 4m. The videos on his YouTube channel, if you were to tally up the number of hours, have been watched for a total of 1,140 years, while Nigel Slater, Nigella Lawson, Christopher Bailey, Anna Wintour and Yotam Ottolenghi are also owners of his pots.
If pottery has ditched its lumpen veneer of crafty earnestness, this millennia-old pastime has also garnered a stellar celebrity fanbase, which includes Brad Pitt, Serena Williams and Leonardo DiCaprio taking to the wheel. Let’s not forget either the popularity of the TV series The Great Pottery Throw Down, which arrived on our screens in 2015, or that artists Edmund de Waal and Grayson Perry have done much to add the cool factor to clay as the antidote to the overwhelm of our digital world.
According to a recent report from the Crafts Council, 73% of Britons buy craft, a significant upsurge from the previous decade, with 20% of them also having a go at it themselves in the proliferation of pottery gyms, such as Turning Earth and the Kiln rooms. Experiential, mindful consumption is part of the rise as are digital platforms and new routes to market with online purchases having grown from 33,000 people in 2006 to 10.3 million in 2020
High Barnet, at the end of the Northern line, is where you need to get off to find 31-year-old Gadsby. But it’s another 20-minute walk up Barnet Hill and St Albans Road before you arrive at a small row of unassuming workshops where meticulously lined up pots – some unfired, some with delicate glazes – fill the shelves of his highly ordered studio.
Sitting at a table, he grins sheepishly, boyish-looking with shoulder-length hair and dressed in a white stripe, dark denim Japanese shirt. He speaks softly, in thoughtful sentences, about his first book, By My Hands, a tenderly written part memoir, part manual where he discusses the hardship and learning experiences of becoming a potter.
His pots are simple: “I try to make objects that I can imagine myself living with and using every day.” His work is characterised by straight lines and an angularity that he thinks owes something to growing up in a city.
“Since I was a child, I have always liked sci-fi and Vorticist art, and I think you can see some of that in my shapes.” He motions to the black pots on the shelf behind him. “Followers on Instagram say one of two things: it’s Darth Vader or the Dune universe.”
The challenge, he thinks, with making simple pottery, is making your voice heard. “It’s more difficult as there are fewer ways of standing out.”
Not that he should be worrying. Nigel Slater, who first bought his pots in 2015, describes them as instantly recognisable for the gentle colour of their glazes and simple forms. “I think of them as the changing colour of the British sky. There is something pure about them, unsullied and uncomplicated. A quiet perfection. His success in part is knowing when to stop.”
Lisa Hammond, for whom Gadsby completed a three-year apprenticeship, talks of pots that “have clean lines, almost drawn in air; while Kate Malone, a former judge on The Great Pottery Throw Down, is equally enthusiastic. “His range has a character that is cool and restrained, intelligent and delicate, yet also robust with a sense of the architectural. He speaks of living a life with clarity.”
Like many potters of his generation, Gadsby also creates informative videos that document his work, sharing the techniques which are central to his making. “I tease him that he posts too often,” says Slater. “But he genuinely seems to enjoy the interaction with his followers.”
Gadsby’s large following owes much to having posted on Instagram every day since 2014 when he was apprenticing for Hammond. What started off as a means of keeping his family and friends up to date, mushroomed into something else altogether.
He admits it can feel like a second job spending on average a couple of hours each evening to create content. (Somewhat ironically, the new Zelda game on his Nintendo, bought on a recent trip to Japan, is how he switches off). “Being online… it’s a double-edged sword, but I appreciate what I have grown. I absolutely wouldn’t be here otherwise. Galleries used to be gatekeepers, but these platforms have made ceramics so much more accessible and demystified the process of making.” His best engagement comes from discussing the trials of running a small business or what he refers to as his “real” posts. Smashing defective pottery is a hit as is showing failure at the wheel or turning the trimming stage, which also gets a lot of views.
His online sales also create a sort of scarcity or Fomo, even if this wasn’t originally his intention. Natalie Melton, acting executive director at the Crafts Council says: “That sense of anticipation waiting for a sale and the jeopardy of trying to get the pieces you want (I’ve tried and failed!) means that he has successfully cultivated a tremendous sense of longing and desire for his pieces.”
“I’m a one-man band, so selling like this means I only have to do the packaging up two to three times a year, in very intense, short bursts, instead of sporadically, which interrupts my making process.” This also allows him to have the freedom to create what he wants, so he is never making to fulfil an order list. His shop content changes and no two months are alike.
What Gadsby has also so ably demonstrated is a savvy understanding of branding. And while he doesn’t directly attribute his marketing skills to his parents – “even using the word ‘my brand’ sounds strange” – it can’t have hurt that he grew up with a photographer mother and a father who was an ad director at Saatchi & Saatchi before leaving to become a metalworker, jeweller, painter and woodworker.
“Both my parents have a very good eye and strong opinions on what they like. My dad is known for filling the house with beautiful things, be it pottery, art, antiques or rows of found stones. My mother is the same.” Life as a potter, however, was not always on the cards. While he is opposed to certain aspects of his Steiner Waldorf education – “There were definitely some odd ideas about ethnic purity” – he acknowledges its curriculum emphasis on crafts, the arts, architecture, agriculture and community exerted a strong influence. From an early age, clay as a material was used extensively. As a kindergarten pupil, he would dig it up from a deposit under a soaring pine tree at the bottom of the garden, turning red mud into lumpy animals and figurines before baking it alongside the bread they made in wood-fired brick ovens.
“Eurythmy” was also practised until Year 12. “That,” he laughs, “is always a good conversation opener. It’s a sort of performative art, dancing and swaying to music, wearing coloured smocks.” He makes a face. “As much as I disliked it as a child, and then we obviously looked ridiculous doing it as we got older, I really grew to love these sessions. There was the sense of community it fostered and as a break later on to swotting for exams.”
When he left, he was overweight, self-conscious, tremendously shy and spent most of his day playing Nintendo, a self-confessed whiz at Mario Kart 64, GoldenEye and Super Smash Bros.
A pivotal moment occurred at the joint family celebrations of his great uncle’s 80th birthday, his second cousin’s 21st and his 18th birthday. “A list of our achievements was read out and when they got to me, my uncle, quite puzzled -looking, read out that I was good at video games. No one clapped or cheered as they had for the others and I felt humiliated in front of all my family because their achievements were so practical and real.” It was then that he decided to spend more time at the potter’s wheel.
He became infatuated with testing and layering glazes, which led to many sepia-coloured pots and also to the work of Bernard Leach, the father of British studio pottery, Lucie Rie and Lisa Hammond.
He admires Anne Mette Hjortshøj’s utilitarian pots with ash glazes over dark clays speckled with tiny orbs of molten white glass. Akiko Hirai’s faceted cups and plates are pieces he envisaged using each day and he adored the rope-impressed work of Tatsuzo Shimaoka.
“I’d watch pottery videos online, hoping to glean some small piece of information about pulling up the clay walls, or perhaps a new method of centring or making handles.” Gradually, his own began to look more purposeful, and he threw with a vision of what he wanted to make, rather than letting a pot materialise from a struggle.
He was accepted at the prestigious Thomastown pottery course in Kilkenny, run by Ireland’s Design & Crafts Council, where he found every type of kiln imaginable: salt ones, multiple gas versions and electric kilns of all shapes and sizes.
Starting off with mugs, he progressed to pots made to other people’s designs, exploring a range of techniques, styles, glazes and firing methods. During his apprenticeships with Hammond at Maze Hill in south London, he was exposed to the busy inner workings of a functioning pottery – “The most efficient period of learning” – and it was through Hammond he was introduced to Ken Matsuzaki with whom he spent a six-month placement in Mashiko, Japan. Here he worked 12-hour shifts six-days a week, and learned about Oribe and Shino glaze pots before showing them at the Kanoya gallery. He doesn’t think he will manage on his own for much longer and will soon need to take on a studio assistant and ideally an apprentice, too.
Are life lessons plentiful as a potter? “Well, dealing with failure is a big one, because you can’t learn this craft without messing up a lot of pots or glazes and ruining kiln firings, so you need to pick yourself up again and again and not be too precious about it, although we are lucky that our raw material is cheap and infinitely recyclable until it’s been fired.”
I venture that he demonstrates a generosity of spirit with all his video sharing, which delves into so much detail. He thinks for a bit before replying. “At the outset, you are making something to be shared, it’s that process of merry moments to be enjoyed with friends. So that want or need to share is there.” Or perhaps his sharing comes from a place of inner confidence? He shrugs shyly. “I suppose even if I was to share all my secrets, no one is ever going to source all the materials from precisely the same place I can, nor are their glazes ever going to be exactly the same as mine. Fundamentally, they’re not me.”
With that, Gadsby is off to sweep his studio, revealing his Virgoan tendencies – “I like to have my tools lined up and ordered spaces, I’ve learned from Ken and Lisa, help your frame of mind” – before going home where his second shift creating content starts over once again.
By My Hands – and extract from Florian Gadsby’s memoir
As a young man, Florian Gadsby was accepted on the prestigious Thomastown pottery course in Kilkenny, run by Ireland’s Design & Crafts Council. In this extract from By My Hands, Gadsby’s second year of studies kicks off with an introduction to porcelain – and Gadsby is captivated by this ‘white gold’ of ceramics. Gus, referred to in this extract, is Gus Mabelson, Gadsby’s principal tutor.
Porcelain is a strange material. In the bags it was delivered in it felt quite solid, a firm press of a thumb would barely indent it, yet once wedged and moved, the body stirred, it started to loosen up. It’s sort of thixotropic, firm when stationary, fluid when disturbed, and running it all through the whirling blades of the de-airing pug turned what was an unusable material into one ready to be thrown with. Nowadays at the studio, as I don’t have a pug mill yet, this process has to be done by hand, which means when I use porcelain, I often have to do a lot of wedging. But to get things started, I simply fling the bag of porcelain firmly against the floor a handful of times, resulting in a series of loud slaps. This blunt force is enough to change the porcelain from being a nightmare to wedge, or knead, to being quite easy to knead.
Porcelain was introduced later in the course as it’s fundamentally a more difficult material to work with. It’s punishing, incredibly so, and having a base set of skills practised on stoneware pots should mean that learning to use this white gold (porcelain is much more expensive than stoneware clay and, historically, once had as high a value as gold as we didn’t know how to reproduce it in the west) is a little bit easier, compared to, say, if you started immediately with it as a beginner. It’s harder to throw with and loses strength quickly, which means it tends to be more troublesome to control on the wheel. It’s a more refined material, and once highly fired it’s unbelievably strong – as demonstrated to us by Gus standing on a wafer-thin porcelain dinner plate placed upside down on the floor.
As it dries, porcelain has a tendency to crack and warp, and glazes interact with it in an entirely different way, as they’re being placed on to a very sealed, bright, white surface – they seem to sing. Colours are vibrant, blacks more intense and whites seem to become even more vivid.
The clay also shrinks more throughout the process, which means you have to throw pots up to 15% larger than they’ll finally be, compared to stoneware that mostly shrinks about 12%. As a result, when throwing porcelain you need to throw pots that are unusually large – colossal teapots, vases and cups that appear fit for giants when initially made, but they will shrink down to a normal size once fired.
Stoneware clay, in comparison, is a walk in the park to work with. You can get away with murder when throwing and trimming it; you can stick pieces of it together without it splitting; and it only warps if you treat it exceptionally poorly or trim it paper thin. When you push firmly against it with a hand or tool the audible response becomes more noticeable, you can feel it, like sandpaper, followed by a tearing sound. It’s like the sound of a revving engine, and the sound is an additional indicator of what you’re doing.
Porcelain, on the other hand, is like an electric car, it’s silent. It’s so smooth that it can be difficult to feel what’s actually happening. You can add grog to porcelain to give you this tactility. It adds strength, too, but by doing this you begin to lose all the qualities that make porcelain so wonderful to work with in the first place.
Even smooth stoneware never feels quite as buttery sleek as porcelain does. It feels as if you’re throwing with gritty mud, whereas porcelain can feel like liquid plastic flowing through your hands.
Getting to grips with porcelain is what led me to find my own voice in ceramics, as I discovered that creating fine and delicate pots resonated with me on a whole new level. Up until then, I’d been creating quite cumbersome work. My vessels were thickly potted with sturdy handles and echoed the work I’d been following so closely that was Leach-esque – classic studio potter’s pots and brown functional objects. Porcelain, though, can be thrown and trimmed to exceedingly fine edges. Textured stoneware can only be made so delicate as the particles of grog begin to take up so much space in the edges themselves, and I quickly became transfixed by this quality, throwing bowls and bottles that tapered to vanishing lips.
I’d trim them finely, so they defied your expectations when lifting them up, and I’d coat them in a shimmering black iron-spot glaze, only to finish them with a scalpel that I ran around the rims, revealing a hair’s width of white among the black, a halo that caught the light and almost seemed to hover. That was the work I ended up making, the conclusion of my stint with porcelain, whereas the porcelain pots I started with were altogether heavier things that more closely resembled the stoneware pieces I was making at the time.
When we switched back to using stoneware clay it felt as if I had superpowers. It was so easy to throw with in comparison, and the walls of pots simply floated up as if by magic, obeying my every command. I felt more at home with stoneware, even though porcelain had shown me a realm of finesse I hadn’t encountered before.
I was using a stoneware that contained lots of iron; it seeped into the glazes as drops of metal, like ink blots on paper, never appearing the same way twice, and I adored it. There’s romanticism in creating pots that resemble the earth and the materials used to create them: be it unrefined clay, crusty surfaces and wood ash glazes melted over them like icing spread over a cake that’s still too hot.
There’s another romantic notion in creating something from nothing. From taking clay, dirt, earth, rocks and minerals from under our feet and turning it into an object that’s highly refined, delicate and light. Into an object that’s the opposite of the source materials used. It feels like sorcery, or like taking lead and turning it into gold, and I find that idea captivating.
By My Hands: A Potter’s Apprenticeship by Florian Gadsby is published by Penguin at £30. Buy it for £26.40 at guardianbookshop.com. The accompanying exhibition runs at Yorkshire Sculpture Park from 4 November (ysp.org.uk)
