Description

Tea and teapots came from China to England in the seventeen hundreds and potters ever since have been continually drawn towards the delights and challenges of this complex form. Today the teapot idiom is now quintessentially part of our English culture.

Students will be encouraged to look closely at the weights and measures of their teapots and to challenge these in relation to proportion and fitness for purpose. One-to-one and group tutorial will be tailored to inspire students to develop new skills and to imaginatively expand upon their own individual approach to teapot making. We’ll be aiming to solve some of wheel throwing’s trickiest problems; the dribblesome spout, the comfort of handles, lids that don’t fall out when tipped! The teapot can be so many things from exuberant, fun and quirky, to simple, bold, and timeless; in fact there are as many possibilities as there are personalities. So exciting!

This course is aimed at more experienced makers, however, we will cater for intermediate and advanced students at different levels of capability. We will experiment with different scale and style of teapots, with a strong emphasis placed upon developing different configurations for lids and galleries.
Clay preparation and wedging techniques will also be covered for those wishing for help with this, along with the range of throwing techniques required to make better upright and spherical forms more efficiently and confidently.
The studio invites a maximum of 9 students for this course. Each participant will enjoy unlimited access to our high-quality stoneware clay, and a power wheel for the full duration. The wheel models are predominantly Fitzwilliam Rayefcos along with a couple of Alsagers.

The course begins on the afternoon of Tuesday 22nd July, 2pm – 5pm, completing at 4pm on Saturday 26th. Tuition hours otherwise are 10am-4pm. The studio is freely available for students to work outside of these hours, early or late. Petra’s fabulous home-made vegetarian lunches, Wednesday through to Saturday, and morning and afternoon refreshments are included in the price of this course, along with wood-fired pizza on Thursday or Friday evening, weather permitting.

Students will be invited to select no more than two favourite teapots to be salt-glazed and wood-fired in Jem & Petra’s Phoenix kiln, at a cost of £5/lb. Given sufficient time on the last day, Jem is happy to provide some instruction and demonstration to help you to raw-glaze and slip-decorate your selected work. A maximum of 2 further completed teapots may be selected for bisque firing, priced at £2/lb. These pots, for gloss and bisque, will be weighed and invoiced post firings, which is usually within about 4-6 months of our Summer courses season. All raw pots that are left for firing are required to carry either a maker’s seal, signature or initials, in order that your pots can be easily identified post-firing. We prefer you to collect your fired work from Wobage, but we’re happy to post it out via courier to students living further afield. A larger selection of work can be taken home green at the end of the course, which will be charged on the last day at a cost of £1.50/lb.

More information about Jeremy Steward is available on the Tutors Pages

Jeremy shares the techniques used to make his wheel-thrown teapots in this recent Ceramic Review YouTube video

Photo by kind permission of Layton Thompson