THE EDIT // STICK CERAMICS

As part of our Farah community content series bringing together creative people across different cultures and crafts, we spent time with Stick - a full-time ceramicist and accidental potter whose process is all about rhythm, repetition and flow. Farah collaborated on a couple of bespoke ceramic pieces and a limited-edition T-shirt, featuring clay-inspired lettering and a direct reference to “The Still Point of the Turning World” an interpretive passage from T.S. Eliot’s ‘Burnt Norton’ poem, – a nod to the stillness and movement found in making.

Working collaboratively with graphic designer Casey Roarty Studio, the pair sharpened their focus on the significance of working in isolation in their day-to-day - creating a theme for the tee - in an attempt to convey a wider meaning and storytelling of Stick’s making process.

This Farah limited-edition tee, ‘There Is Only the Dance’ celebrates Stick’s solo journey into becoming a ceramicist, the contentment of working alone; from the hours of self-taught practice in a London flat, to the necessity of designing and building a purpose built studio, where he now works in south-east London.

Check out the full interview below.

Hey Stick, can you tell us a bit about yourself?

My name's Stick, I'm a full-time ceramicist. I work from my own purpose-built studio, making functional tableware mostly.

Has ceramics been something you've always had in your life or was it a late interest?

No, not always. 2017 was when I first did a course, so yeah, relatively new, eight years in. I took it up because I think at the time I was probably going through something a little bit difficult. I lost my dad, I lost my mum within three years of one another in my 20s, so I was looking for something to find a bit of therapy with I suppose, and pottery and doing this on my own was a good outlet for me.

That’s really inspiring. And now you teach as well?

Yeah, the teaching is really cool because, you know, working in isolation in this studio is amazing I'm really lucky to do it, but when you do it full-time, there's a sense of cabin fever every now and then and actually what the teaching gives me is a nice outlet to meet students and I always come back from teaching feeling quite energised.

What does ceramic work give you that previous jobs haven’t?

Well, the obvious one is being creative and just having full autonomy over that creativity. It's really special, I’m very lucky to be able to do that. I love working with my hands, it's another really unique part to my working life and probably a bit of an obvious one, but also the flexibility. Working for myself is super fun and I can be as flexible as I need to be and that's really coming to its own now as I've started a new family.

How's it been balancing family life with ceramics at the moment?

I mean, it's a battle normally, to be honest, working at the bottom of my garden and having my home so close, it's a big distraction. You can easily get pulled away and lose a bit of time. When I first started, I was working in our spare bedroom and I think my commute, as I called it, was about eight steps from my bedroom and it was incredibly challenging. It was really quite dangerous and very unhealthy, looking back. So we moved the studio to the back of the garden, to create a little space between the two.

It's hard, it's really difficult to manage that. It's even more difficult now having a little one in the family. But yeah, you need a bit of discipline if you're going to work on your own anyway. So it’s just about exercising that as much as possible.

I think I'm just about making it work.

Is the new member to the family a new creative inspiration, would you say?

Having Winnie here now, you don't tend to waste too many minutes in the studio. Once I'm here, I'm working as hard as I can. She's definitely a motivation to not waste any time and to be as productive as I possibly can be.

What has been your favourite project you've worked on in the past?

So a favourite recent project that I've been working on has been working with a company called Kabn, who have built these amazing, luxurious, off-grid cabins up in Scotland. There's a couple on Loch Fyne currently. So I've been really lucky to be able to make a collection of dinnerware for those cabins and very lucky to have been able to go up there recently and hand deliver those pieces.

That was really cool. It’s been great to be collaborating with those guys.

Tell us about your studio, how was the building process and how long did it take? Are you looking to upgrade yet?

So this studio was really built through necessity. I've been working prior to this in some really compromising spaces. It started off in a 50 square feet spare bedroom in a flat. We were very lucky to buy this house. I was still working, still having to pay a mortgage and it was just every spare minute I had, chipping away at this studio-build..

I had a friend who helped out with some drawings, which made things much easier, and I had my father-in-law and a good friend of mine help out with the heavy lifting side of things. But everything else was built by myself. .

And that was really when I had the most motivation I've probably ever had to work full time as a potter. I knew that if I was to be able to make this work as a living, I had to make this space, so there felt like a little bit of pressure.

Overall I just really enjoyed it. I absolutely love building it. I love working in it.

Did you have a lot of support from the people around you when you first decided that you wanted to do this full time?

Yeah, I think I did. One of the most powerful things one can do is believe in something, someone. I was very lucky I had friends and family that believed in what I was doing, and that built self-confidence and self-efficiency in myself. It was a really strange time when I set this up. I fell into it. It was an accident.

I had a small space where I was able to work and learn and just experiment. The amount of experimenting I did in the first few months of working in my little spare room, that really helped propel me into it. I think I was quite lucky.

I had a couple of fairly substantial commissions come in quite early on and they really helped set me up. From that point I've never really looked back to be perfectly honest.

And yeah, the work keeps coming in. So it's just about enjoying it while it lasts really because it's quite a unique job working as a potter full time. It's a fragile industry and it comes with its challenges.

Are there any communities that you’re a part of within the Ceramics world?

I've built up a network of people over the last four or five years that have supported what I've done. People that I talk to creatively, people that I go to for support. So I suppose in that sense there's definitely a group of people that I've met since starting this, which has been really great.

Talk to us about your personal style. Is it a factor in your day-to-day life or in your work?

I definitely lean towards more work wear clothing, in the studio it needs to be clothes that can take a bit of a battering and still look good.

What advice would you give to anyone who wanted to start pottery as a hobby?

Advice to anyone starting, I would probably say, experiment. Try as much and as many different sorts of mediums within the ceramics industry as possible to learn what you're into and what you're good at. Try and be, if you're able to be, taught by as many different potters and different teachers as possible because there's so many different ways of doing the same thing and gaining that experience from different experts is always really useful, I think.

Practice and research is the main crux of the whole thing, really.

Yeah, definitely, and I think that's the big hurdle for a lot of hobbyist potters, access to a kiln, the financial side of things, how much it costs to actually create work and also just how long it takes to create work. I don't think people appreciate how long it can take from starting out making a piece to when it gets finished, it can be several weeks, it can be longer. Firings do take a long time as well, so it's not something that you can rush. It can be a very slow and considered process.

I can imagine when you're mass-producing you're not even thinking about adding those final touches or it being perfect.

Exactly. Financially, traditional pottery, you need to make quickly to make it work, whereas I probably spend more time than the average potter on each piece. So, making that work and creating enough work is always a fine line, but I think what I've learned is that spending a bit more time on pots, the by-product of that, is actually creating a bit more demand. By not having wares available all the time it creates that demand. It keeps you active and keeps you, I suppose, relevant and people want your stuff a little bit more.

You know, restaurants, bakeries, coffee shops, in particular, at the minute, they want that story and they want that narrative to be part of their business, and I’m always very grateful to be part of their vision. They want customers to pick up a coffee cup and know where and how it's been made and that story just builds into the ethos of their business.

That's actually a really good way to look at it, the more that you build on yourself and your own business, the more that they'll be attracted to that to build them up.

So all these things are like me as an independent potter, building my own studio and trying to be more sustainable with the practice that I've got and using wild clay trying to use that with different pieces that are then going into restaurants and bakeries and coffee shops and things like that. Yeah, it's definitely well received.

Hitting all the sustainability points.

I'm trying to, it definitely plays on your mind when you're operating a kiln and once you create ceramic pieces, they tend to stick around for a while. So, you've got to be really mindful of that and not just fire work for the sake of it.

I mean, there's no shortage of handmade pots at the minute. So you've got to be thinking about that for sure.

Anything exciting in the pipeline?

Yeah, there's always something exciting. I mean, there's a few things, some things I probably shouldn't talk about, mostly because they've not actually come to fruition yet. It's normally just an Instagram message and a little chat. I'm just having a bit of fun really working with a few coffee shops in the Middle East, which is really great to work with different businesses internationally. It's always fun. I just finished some work with a company in Qatar and have a couple more coffee shops in Doha and Lebanon.

I've been working recently with a business called the Golden Earth Studio, running a lot of tests and a lot of samples. They basically intercept a lot of clay from construction sites and divert it from going to landfill. All the time there's just tonnes and tonnes, literal tonnes of clay, heading to landfill so this studio is actually putting clay into the hands of other creatives. At the moment I'm working on a collection for those guys and I'm really excited by that.

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@stick_ceramics
T-shirt artwork by Casey Roarty Design @caseyroarty

https://www.stickceramics.co.uk
Limited edition Farah Menswear x Stick Ceramics pieces available to purchase.

Ceramics available for viewing in our Berwick St store until Friday 27th June 2025. Tees online & in store until stocks last.