Maker Studios
Ceramics, print and furniture, working next door to one another on the top floor.
The rope walk is one long room with a row of north windows, which is the reason it was worth keeping and the reason the studios ended up here rather than in the basement. It was divided into three with stud walls and left otherwise as it was found, down to the hooks in the ceiling.
Each studio is run by the makers in it. They keep their own hours, take their own commissions, and between them run most of what is taught in the building.
The kiln room and the extraction are shared, which means the firing schedule is a rota on the wall rather than a booking system, and it works because there are few enough people to ask.
Classes
Small groups, mostly in the evenings, taught by the makers whose studio you are standing in. Nothing here assumes you have done it before unless it says so.
The whole of it, from centring a lump of clay to taking a finished pot off the wheel. Most people spend the first evening failing to centre anything, and that is expected.
Cut a stencil in the morning, pull an edition in the afternoon, go home with the prints and the screen cleaned by somebody else.
Joints, glue blocks, a broken stretcher, a seat that has gone. Bring the actual chair you want fixed rather than a photograph of it, because the repair depends on how it was made.
Metal type out of the case, locked up, inked and printed. Slow, and the reason people keep coming back to it.
In order, because each one depends on the last. Miss one and you can sit in on it the following term.
Evening one
Wedging the clay, getting it on the wheel, and the arm position that does the work so your hands do not have to.
Evening two
The first cylinder. Everybody's first one is heavy at the bottom; the second is the fix.
Evening three
A bowl and a beaker out of the same starting form, and where the wall goes thin without telling you.
Evening four
Turning the pot upside down on the wheel to cut a foot into it, which is the step that makes a pot look finished rather than made.
Evening five
Pulling a handle and attaching it at the right dryness, which is the whole difference between one that stays on and one that does not.
Evening six
Dipping, waxing the foot, and packing a shelf. Work is fired after the course and can be collected from the studio office.
What a tenancy comes with. Printed copies are in the folder on the studio office door.
What you are agreeing to, one page, before the version the solicitor wrote.
180 KBHow the rota works, what a shared firing costs to run, and who to tell if a firing overruns.
240 KBThe bins, the settling trap on the clay sink, and the collections the building pays for.
310 KBRead the second half. Your own tools and finished work are not covered by ours.
150 KBShort, and worth reading on the way in rather than after.
Clay does come out of most things. Print ink does not.
90 KBPDFThe kiln room, and the rules that are not negotiableFour of them. They exist because the room reaches temperatures nothing else in the building does.
120 KBPDFGetting up here: the lift, the stairs and the goods doorThe passenger lift stops one floor short. The goods lift does not, and you are welcome to use it.
110 KBTaking a studio
A bench, a locking cupboard, three-phase power on the furniture side and a key that works at any hour. Rent is monthly and includes the heating, which in a building this old is not a small line.
The shared kiln, the extraction and the glaze room come with it. So does a share of the rota that keeps them running, which is the part people forget to ask about.
Studios come up when somebody leaves, which is usually at the end of a term rather than the end of a month. Ask to be told when one does, and come and stand in it before you decide.