Seth Rogen and Serena Williams have joined the growing ranks of amateur potters, and fashion designers are being drawn to the wheel too. We get our hands dirty with the new ceramicists
t’s Saturday morning and a group of women are standing in a nervous huddle, waiting to see if the vases and bowls they popped into the kiln last week have survived. “That came out really nice,” says one student. “Oh, wow!” proclaims another, holding up a small bowl. “I’m so proud of me.”, their 30-year-old teacher, looks on at this studio in Kingsgate Workshops, in London, like a mother watching her children make fairy cakes for the first time. “It’s really fun seeing their reactions,” she says.
She studied at Chelsea College of Arts, but it was her father, Chris Bramble, who has been teaching ceramics for 30 years, who passed on his craft to his daughter and her twin sister, also a ceramicist and performance artist. It’s hard to get a place in Freya and Chris’s classes at the moment. “They’re always booked up,” says Emily, one of today’s pupils. “You have to keep trying.”Photograph: BBCare on fire.