Our Story
We are at a pivotal moment in British Ceramics. Clay knowledge has increasingly been pushed out of Higher Education and instead into a diverse community of artists and makers who are redefining what clay practice means, how it’s practiced and who practices it. Rather than viewing this as a moment of decline, we view this as a moment of opportunity to reframe clay as a centralising force for building community.
In 2021, our director Eva Masterman began a PhD to investigate this moment. After hours of conversations and collaborations with artists, educators and makers all working with clay, she identified at least one public-facing clay studio in every city across the UK, growing activity rurally and in gallery and museum learning programmes, and a wave of artistic practice which centres this amazing material as a vehicle for community benefit.
This activity touches almost every strata of society, from professional development for artists, crisis support for young people, creative relief for those effected by dementia, and more. There is an urgency to develop more accessible and sustainable working and teaching approaches to support this expansive practice, and The Clay Commons CIC launched in 2025 as a new nationwide platform to provide a space to learn and thrive together, with the material we all know and love to guide us.
The Commons
A commons is a set of resources, collectively stewarded by a community under a co-created set of values. Our resources are everything clay and community, the knowledge and organising alongside the physical studios and materials we collaborate with. Our community is our members, and anyone else who works with clay, or might want to. The last and most important part of the commons are our values, which have been formed in collaboration with our community.
We also use the term clay work to describe clay practice within this structure because the work being done is more expansive than traditional terms such as ceramic or pottery allows. Clay work is a term coined by Nathalie Batraville and Shaya Ishaq in their article Red Dust and Black Clay in Canadian Art, 2021 and is defined as:
‘socially engaged ceramic art practice that is intentional about materiality, pedagogy, community and access.’
Access
Material
Education
Community
Our Values
We understand the power of collaborating with materials and people and learning through doing. This curiosity drives The Clay Commons CIC, advocating for all our members lived experiences and fostering shared knowledge. We are also deeply committed to activist and educator bell hooks’ understanding of education as a practice of freedom, a place to nurture agency and imagination and actively resist and dismantle systemic oppressions.
Our community is anyone working with clay, with a focus on those who are interested in sharing that practice with others, whether that be in a traditional studio, in a classroom, hospital or street corner. We believe a communal effort is needed to combat increasing national and global challenges, where we come together to look after ourselves, each other and our world, forming social networks of care-based cooperation that can sustain us into the future.
Working with clay comes with specific needs and challenges, but also a global and infinitely diverse medium, found in every society and community for the last 20,000 years. It is this expansive quality that we embrace: clay itself, the land, the technical knowledge, the histories and the ways of organising and learning with clay that have forged our cultures and that we continue to enact daily, in our studios.
We believe that everyone has the right to transformative clay experiences and access to professional development and creative education. We also recognise that systemic barriers require vigilance, self reflection and critical awareness to combat and we are committed to working with our community to learn, respond, adapt and advocate towards more equitable clay-centred futures.
Blue
she/they
Laura Mingozzi-Marsh she/her
Eva Masterman she/her
Our Team
Founding Director
Eva.masterman@gmail.com
Mingo Mingo Studios
Graphic Designer
mingomingo.co.uk
Moral Support
(When she gets enough Dreamies)
Working on it.
Our Board
Mission
Our mission is to build an accessible, resilient and creative network of ceramic activity across the UK, challenging systemic issues in the field and reframing clay as a catalyst for societal change.
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