Pottery to me is a brilliant creative medium which combines hand craft with painting. Clay allows you to make an object which can be useful as well as decorative, and then by using slips and glazes you can create images and pictures on a piece that you can use daily. The clay I use is stoneware, which is fired to a temperature of around 1240’C to give hard wearing pottery. Before a pot is fired the ‘greenware’ is painted with slip. Slip is a clay slurry mixed with pigments to give a ‘paint’. However, unlike painting on canvas, the colours once fired will often change, so you are never quite sure what you will end up with, which is part of the excitement of pottery!