A maker in her element: for ceramicist Joanna Still, a 40-year relationship with clay was born of an essential connection with the earth – and how it provides a bond with our own history. ‘ There’s something very primal about it,’ she says…Words Diana Woolf Joanna Still in her studio, surrounded by works made for the Hinterland spring show at Messums Wiltshire. Photographs Trent McMinn Ceramist Joanna Still lives and works in the Wiltshire village of Hindon in a picturepostcard Tardis of a house. From the street it’s seemingly a small stone terrace, but once inside you can see it has engulfed its neighbours and – more significantly – the steep back garden climbs up to not one, but two artists’ studios. The lower one belongs to Still’s sculptor husband Tim Harrisson, while the higher one, with its view over the village rooftops, is her own personal eyrie. Inside are two potter’s wheels, a small electric kiln, and tidily arranged rows of ceramics, the smaller pots on shelves and the larger, heftier vessels sitting on any other available surface. Still tells me that it used to be the village lock-up, but by knocking down an interior wall and adding a wood-burning fire and more windows, she has transformed it into a cosy, lightfilled studio; the perfect space for both contemplation and creation.Back inside the house, Still, who is tall and elegant, with sense of calm selfpossession, offers me tea. She serves it in a pretty yellow mug painted with a wreath of leaves: ‘It’s one I made earlier,’ she says with a laugh. Its gentle, decorative charm is a long way from her newest body of work, Hinterland, with its abstract surfaces and bold, muscular shapes, and neatly sums up just how much her practice has developed over her 40-odd-year career. Setting out to unpick some of the twists and turns taken during this creative journey, I ask if she had always been interested in working in clay.‘I was a creative child, interested in drawing and painting and always responsive to looking at objects,’ she replies. But it wasn’t until her early 20s that she decided to study pottery. When I ask why – and when – she was first attracted to clay as a material, she hesitates. ‘I don’t really know. It was just one of those strange, instinctive mysteries.’ However, a little further into our conversation, she explores the idea that perhaps her country childhood made her receptive to its physicality. ‘I was bought up on a farm. I was used to rolling up my sleeves and getting my hands dirty. My mother ran the farm and was driving tractors and lambing and chucking out pig swill… so it’s probably something to do with that connection with the earth.’Whatever the reason for her initial attraction to clay, there is no mistaking Still’s ongoing passion for the material. She relishes its feel and malleability: ‘It’s good in the hand and you can imagine it’s good underfoot, squelching through your toes – there’s something very primal about it. And it’s so tactile, and impressionable in the way that you can make an impression in it and it receives it very easily – it’s very responsive, quite tolerant and very strong.’As well as the pleasure Still finds in the hands-on process of pottery, she is interested in its history and the role it has played in shaping past civilisations – and our knowledge of them. ‘Once it’s fired clay endures longer than metal, longer than wood, longer than anything, so it’s given us clues to the past, and our knowledge about past civilisations is informed by clay objects.’ Historical ceramics also intrigue her because of their direct link to past makers. ‘I find it fascinating when I look at works made by potters from other cultures because you can often see the print of the hand on them and you know as a potter how they have been formed.’Still is also intrigued by the way the process of making ceramics is so firmly linked to the elements: ‘It’s fascinating that the element of earth – the clay – is put through this transformative process of fire – another element – to create a finished work that evokes yet another element.’ She expands, saying, ‘Sometimes people respond to the surfaces of my work and see a seascape or a landscape or a cloudscape in it and I think, what an interesting pattern that is – to go through earth, then through fire, to another element, or indeed “the elements”, as some people call the weather.’in the house, a large storage pot bought in Provence sits beside the window; the etching behind it is by Dieter Pietsch and to the left of the window is a drawing by Still’s husband, Tim Harrisson; on the table is a cast-iron sculpture by Hannah LeesStill prepares to add soft clay to the thrown base to build up the walls of the pot on the electric wheel. The detail, shows how clay slip can be transferred to the surface of the pot using newspaper – one of many techniques Still uses to create the final texture, leftthe barrel used to smoke-fire the pots. The fire has just been lit, but once it’s going the lid is clamped down to create an intense reduction processsShe neatly, if unconsciously, underlines the strong link she sees between ceramics and the elements when we talk about Still’s decision to study ceramics as a young woman: ‘Clay just suited me. I think the earth was the right element for me.’Her instinctive love of the material was formalised by a two-year course studying studio pottery at Harrow School of Art in the 1970s. ‘It was a fantastic opportunity and a good choice for me, as it was a practical course. It had the advantage of being outside London, which meant it had a great big experimental kiln site, so we could learn how to build kilns and experiment with firing.’As well as such pyrotechnical fun and games, the course gave Still a solid technical grounding: ‘Harrow was still focused pretty much on throwing pots on a wheel and we learnt how to throw in quite a disciplined way.’ Interestingly, these two aspects of ceramics, throwing and experimental firings, have been recurring themes throughout her career.On leaving Harrow, Still set up a pottery in Ansty in Wiltshire, where she made her own kiln and started producing a range of salt-glazed stoneware. However, she only stayed there for a few years, before moving with her husband Tim to their current home in 1980. ‘The type of firing and kiln I had been using was not going to work here in the middle of a village, as it was noisy and belched out smoke, so I had to think of something else that would suit my circumstances,’ she says. The result was a range of decorative domestic earthenware including plates and jugs (and my tea mug), which were made in a neighbourly fashion in a clean and tidy electric kiln. She recalls the joy of making these pieces for the home and the pleasure she got from working with colour. ‘It was a wonderful opportunity to develop my painting style, to use colour and a paint brush to invent paintings around a pot – making the decoration fit the form was important for me.’Still spent the next few decades concentrating on these ceramics, but she eventually felt the urge to explore new creative paths. ‘I felt I had gone as far as I could,’ she says. ‘My original interest in the material was somehow getting lost behind the glaze and I wanted to get back to the more elemental aspect of making pots that had originally attracted me.’Various study trips and residencies – to Mexico, Ethiopia and Spain – allowed her to explore new approaches. At the Artigas Studio in Spain, she experimented with wood firing and making sculptural, semifigurative pieces. (A few examples sit on the top shelf in her studio – large, smokeblackened torsos, they seem like ancient deities guarding the space.) But this process actually made Still realise that she wanted to make something very different: pots.‘I realised that I wanted to make something contemporary, that didn’t look like a grave object or relic, so it was a question of finding a form that was contemporary in feel but used these “primitive” methods.’ Why pots in particular? ‘Pots have an interior and hold something, even if it is not a thing but an idea – and they have a historical lineage with different memories and triggers.’Still started exploring the smoke-firing process in 2005 and showed her first examples of the work in 2007 – their dark, smoky poetry a dramatic departure from the sunny charm of her domestic ware. The pots were shaped on the wheel, coloured with slip and bisque-fired in her electric kiln before being smoke-fired – which involves the slightly alarming process of burying the pots in an old oil barrel full of sawdust and then setting fire to it. No flame appears, but as the sawdust gradually burns down, smoke and ash travel around the vessels, depositing subtle shadows across their surfaces. These overlay the base colours in swirling waves, creating a mysterious effect, which in some recall the misty ink washes of Chinese landscape paintings and in others billowing storm clouds. ‘There is something fascinating about the effect of the fire – it gives the surface more depth, more interest, more variety.’ It’s obviously a risky process, but Still embraces this: ‘Smoke and fire are unpredictable and elusive, but you have to accept this random element.’Still continued to make these quiet, contemplative pieces, with their gently evocative surfaces and elegant forms, for about 10 years, but last year made an abrupt change of direction that resulted in Hinterland. These new pots are made in the same way as their older sisters – thrown on a wheel, painted and smoke-fired – but are very different in temperament, demanding attention like a louder, younger brother. For a start they are much bigger, and their shapes are less perfectly balanced, as Still allows – and indeed emphasises – any asymmetry in their form by pulling and pinching the top edges into craggy, jaggedy lines. The surfaces have lost the smooth polish of the previous designs and are now grooved and pitted to create a texture akin to weathered masonry or ancient rock formations. And the colour she used so skilfully in her domestic ware has resurfaced, with unexpected splashes of yellow, orange and even pink appearing among the shadows. One of the changes that heralded this new direction was buying her first electric wheel, replacing her ‘old war horse’, a Leach kick wheel. The electric version allowed her much greater freedom of movement, as she no longer had to power the wheel with her foot. The result is a body of work that Still describes as more physical and energetic. The forms are also more irregular, since instead of concentrating on creating the perfectly balanced pot, she has relaxed her throwing to embrace the accidental – often including an element of hand building as well. ‘I think that the shift [in direction] has somehow brought into alignment for me the processes of making and firing, as the random element which you are expecting – and accepting – in the smoke firing is now present in the making process too.’The way in which Still decorates the surface is similarly random. ‘It’s quite a spontaneous and intuitive process,’ she says. ‘I am quite liberal with the materials I use now. I use clay slip and oxides or pigments, and I can paint it in a wash, or I can spray it, or imprint it.’It’s almost like action painting, with Still allowing dribbles of slip and flicks of colour to rest where they fall, sure in the knowledge that the imprint of her hand and the smoke firing will unify the surfaces into a coherent whole. Still is a maker who has the confidence to trust the instincts built up over a long career – and these pots are a celebration both of that career and of the satisfaction she finds in the physical, elemental process of working with clay. joannastillceramics.comStill with past works, works in progress, discarded works and shards, showing how her style has developed over time – ‘I wanted to get back to the more elemental aspect of making pots that originally attracted me’