If you put a lump of clay in my hand on a quiet afternoon, I’d probably forget the rest of the day existed. There’s something about the way it warms to your skin, takes the print of your thumb, and politely refuses to be rushed — it pulls you into its own pace whether you’ve got time for it or not.
Most pottery you see on a shelf these days is slip cast or thrown on a wheel — and the wheel is wonderful, no argument. But almost everything I make at Henroo is built another way, with my hands and a couple of patient afternoons. So here’s a little love letter to the technique I keep coming back to: handbuilding.
Three ways to grow a pot from a lump of clay
Handbuilding isn’t really one technique — it’s a small family of them, often used together in the same piece. The three classics:
Pinch. Press your thumbs into a ball of clay, then turn and squeeze with your fingers until the walls thin out. It’s the oldest pottery technique on earth — pinched bowls predate the wheel by thousands of years — and it’s the one I reach for when I’m building small, round forms with personality. The monsters are pinch-pots underneath all the eyes and ears.
Coil. Roll the clay into long ropes and stack them, smoothing each one into the next as you go. Coiling lets you build taller and curvier than a pinch will allow — vases, jugs, pieces that need to flare in and out as they climb.
Slab. Roll the clay flat with a rolling pin (or a slab roller, if you’re lucky enough to have one), cut shapes out of it like pastry, and join them up. Slab building is how you get crisp edges, flat-sided things, mugs, boxes, tiles — anything that wants to remember it was once a sheet.
Most of what comes out of my studio uses a bit of all three. A coil for the body, a slab for the base, pinched details for character.
You can’t bully clay into the shape you want — it’ll let you know when it’s ready and when it isn’t. Half the craft is learning to listen.
Why slow, and why by hand
A pot thrown on a wheel can take its shape in a matter of minutes; a handbuilt piece often takes days. Build a bit, wait for it to firm up, build a bit more, wait again. Leather-hard before you can carve. Bone-dry before it goes near the kiln. Two firings before it lives on a shelf.
I love that pace. There’s no machine setting the tempo, no batch of identical ones rolling off a line. Each piece carries the marks of the hand that made it — a softer curve here, a fingerprint in the base, a wobble that turns out to be exactly the right wobble. By the time it’s glazed and out of the kiln, it’s already a small character with opinions of its own.
It also means no two pieces ever come out quite the same, even when they’re siblings — which is, for me, the whole point.
If you’re curious to see where this all ends up, the shop has the latest pieces and Instagram is where I share the wonky in-progress shots and the kiln-opening reveals. New drops land regularly, and as ever — once a piece is gone, it’s gone for good.
