Village Raw - ISSUE 15

VILLAGE RAW
ART & CULTURE
These pages: Turning Earth Haringey, which opened in January.
inspired by the culture of hobby ceramics in the US when she was
touring the country as a theatre manager. “I was living in the US
from 2009 to 2012 working in theatre, and I realised that there were
community access pottery studios in most cities. They were aimed
at hobbyists, not professionals, and you could come and use them
in your spare time.”
Returning home, Maughan saw an opportunity to shift the culture
to make pottery available to more people through affordable
classes and practice space. “Pottery has always been an inaccessible
craft because it requires you to have the right materials and
someone to fire your work and you also have to understand what
temperature to fire your clay at, and how to make the glaze, etc.
So it has to be curated for you,” she says. “I’d been to a community
college class in Hackney and got two hours a week access
which wasn’t really enough because it takes 10,000 hours to master
something. What you need is to be able to come and go as you
please. Also clay dries in a very specific way, so you need the freedom
to come and check on it.”
The first Turning Earth opened in Hoxton in 2013, operating on a
gym-membership-style pay per month scheme where people had
flexible access up to 15 hours a week with shelf space to store their
materials and projects, as well as access to classes. As the first ceramics
studio of its kind, interest was high from the start, as Maughan
explains. “That was the very first time that it had been done in the
UK. And it was immediately, crazily popular. We quickly got to capacity
which is about 200 users a month, and we ran about seven classes.”
Four years later, Turning E10 opened in Leyton, occupying over
8,000 sq ft of the top floor of an old hardware factory. Today, as
we chat, Maughan is excited about the next chapter in the Turning
Earth story. It’s the first week in January and she’s preparing
to open the doors to new students and members at a brand new
space - Turning Earth N22, based in the Crawley Road industrial estate.
“When I first came back from the US, east London seemed
like the safest place to open up, which turned out to be true. But
I’m from Haringey and I live here, and now enough time has passed
and ceramics is now so ingrained that it seemed the right time to
take a punt and open a large ceramics centre here.” The centre was
opened by Keith Brymer Jones (The Great Pottery Throw Down) and
Mayor of Haringey Adam Jogee in December 2021.
Over in Highgate, artist couple Basil Olton and Veronika Seifert
teach fine art and ceramics courses for children and adults at Highgate
Art School, which came out of their studio HalfaDozen in a shop
on Archway Road - where passersby can see the artistic processes
at work. Basil explains: “The idea of HalfaDozen studio was breaking
that link with the art and process, so the process of making isn’t hidden
because it’s in a shop front - and the art school is on the corner.”
The pair have worked locally for over ten years. They took over
the lease for the studio building in 2016, then opened Highgate Art
School next door in 2018. The studio offers membership at different
price points for artists of all disciplines, and the art school teach-
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