From a lump of clay to your table
Four stages, a lot of patience and quite a bit of mud. Everything at Terra & Ton goes through them in a batch of twenty.
Imogen Hale has been making pots this way at Wapping Wharf since 2018. Working in twenties keeps the studio small and the pots consistent enough to set a table with, while still leaving room for each one to have its own little quirks.
Clay
Every pot starts as a lump of stoneware clay. Before it goes anywhere near the wheel, it's wedged by hand: pushed, folded and turned on the bench, a bit like kneading bread, until it's smooth all the way through and there are no air pockets hiding inside.
Air bubbles are the enemy here. Left in, they can make a pot misbehave in the kiln, so this is the stage where patience pays off. Twenty pots means twenty balls of clay, ready to become a matching family.
Throwing
Then the clay goes on the wheel. Imogen centres it, opens it up and pulls the walls into shape: a bowl, a mug, a plate or a vase. All twenty in the batch are thrown in one go, so they share the same rhythm and the same hands.
Once they've firmed up to leather-hard, each pot is turned upside down and trimmed to give it a neat foot. Mugs get their handles at this point too. Then the whole batch dries slowly together on the shelf.
Glazing
Once the pots are dry, it's time for colour. The whole batch of twenty is glazed together, so the colours sit as a family: Estuary, Oat, Clay pink, Terracotta or Charcoal.
The glaze stops in a wavy line above the foot and the bottom is left as raw clay. That's the bit you can feel under your thumb, and the reason our drawings always show a band of bare terracotta at the base of every pot.
Firing
Into the kiln they go, all twenty at once. The heat melts the glaze into glass and turns the clay into hard, hard-wearing stoneware. As it melts, the glaze moves a little, pooling deeper in one bowl and breaking thinner over the rim of another.
Then comes the slow cool-down and the best bit: opening the door. It never gets less exciting. Once the batch has been checked over, it's wrapped up and posted to its new homes, and the wheel goes quiet until the next twenty.