Finn Beales, James Burnett-Stewart

James Burnett-Stuart makes pots in a workshop at the edge of a farm outside Kington, in the hill country of Herefordshire. He trained at Harrow in the late eighties, having come to pottery by way of an English Literature degree at Cambridge — a route that perhaps explains the particular attentiveness he brings to his work, and to the words he uses to describe it.

All his pots are thrown or hand-built from red earthenware, slipped and glazed, many altered immediately off the wheel — scalloped, fluted, pressed into forms. They carry the influence of their surroundings: local hedgerows, Herefordshire weather, Japanese and European traditions, ancient Roman glass, and the ordinary vessels of a childhood he has never entirely left behind.

James talks about pots entering lives stealthily, benignly, companions that offer beauty and practical service without demanding attention. The cup above all: the thing we raise to our lips several times a day, cradle in both hands, select or reject according to some inward inclination we are barely conscious of. He says he would always make mugs.

After a decade away from ceramics he returned to the wheel in 2009, here in these hills. Looking at his hands now, and at the work they make, the break is hard to imagine.

“When I arrived at the workshop I found myself drawn almost immediately to his hands. The creases packed with clay and the particular way a potter’s hands hold things, cradling rather than gripping, feeling for weight and temperature simultaneously. I wanted to get close to that.”

— Finn Beales