In January 2020 we started work on prototypes for a range of Standard Ware Pottery. Sunken Studio Standard Ware is a functional range of simple pots made for everyday use. Our pots are made collaboratively. The whole team works on them and we plan to use our production activities to complement training and development at the studio.

Alongside a busy workshop schedule, we’d been developing forms and researching glazes. Of course all our plans changed in March. Covid-19 damaged us and studio life.

There have been challenges. Our direction has been constrained by what we have in stock - we’ve improvised with the raw materials we had. Our first batch of pots are made in a white earthenware clay glazed in a glossy transparent glaze in yellow, pink and blue. Design decisions have been impacted by the circumstances we’re in but limitations have served us well - they’ve provided clarity and focus.

Before the thing... we’d spent ages testing glazes. We’d been searching for a gloss, satin and matt glaze and had been exploring colour. There wasn’t much guiding our decisions about colour - which had been bugging me. We each have preferences but needed something coherent to pull everything together - colour is a complicated beast.

I think about colour, surface and light a lot & keep returning to a trip to Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. I went on a quest to see flower pyramids but left feeling changed by the paintings. Oh & the boats!

I’ve been returning to Vermeer since that trip. His paintings are rich with material characteristics, radiant, neutral, brooding, introspective. That trip was 4 or 5 years ago. It’s taken a while to synthesis its impact. Why now? There’s something in the domesticity - interiors and people spending time at home. Inside, looking at us. I think we’re all doing that at the moment & hoping. Aside from all that, I quite like the idea of referencing genre painting in our pots - everyday, within everyday. Painters and potters have allied interests.

Our pots are made by humans using hand-forming processes. They’re all different - just like us. We work on them together as a team - they’re unfussy, fit around studio life (courses and workshops) and it makes us happy to make them. We love making them together - we’re a small team, family really!

We’re now sharing our simple pleasures: things that feel good and affirm our humanity. Pots made together, and used together.