Basalt

Basalt

Simplicity is a challenging friend to keep but a perfect companion when you can find it!

For me, visiting Stoke on Trent for the first time in the early 1990s was to be assailed by a great sea of pottery that mostly I found hard to make friends with – forms and patterns that I couldn’t connect with let alone understand the people who could?

I therefore found myself on a personal mission to find a way of communicating my own style that would contrast with what I saw around me and maybe if I was lucky connect with a customer that felt that same.

It was a tricky process and I needed to learn how to get the precise details that I designed to be moulded not to be erased in the traditional sponging process, or how to apply black glaze so that it was flawlessly smooth (and didn’t contaminate the whole factory which would have put me in the nearest Stoke jail!)?

Basalt was the result of these early trials and errors with some indulgence of my whims by the skill and support of local ‘heroes’ such as Malcolm Burden. It was truly perplexing at first but eventually it came good and in its own way turned into quite the market leader.

In fact, it was the key that unlocked a much bigger door than I could imagine because it brought me to the attention of Wedgwood and all that followed …so it became known as ‘Basalt’ in honour of someone I then learned about properly – Old Josiah himself.