Our Story

Clay education and practice is at a crossroads.

Clay has never felt more alive. Pottery classes are full, community studios are growing, and independent tutors, collectives and adult learning providers are opening new routes into making. Across social media, galleries, community spaces and studios, clay is being rediscovered as a material of connection, attention and wellbeing.

Yet the structures that once supported professional clay practice are under pressure. Rising costs have driven formal craft provision into decline, leaving practitioners working across fragmented freelance, institutional and community contexts. Emerging makers are passionate but often unsure where to find training, mentorship or material knowledge. Increasingly, independent studios and makers are finding themselves carrying this demand for clay engagement, while often doing so with limited professional infrastructure, funding or support.

This is the contradiction at the heart of clay today: public interest is rising, but the systems that sustain it remain fragile.

The Clay Commons CIC exists in response to this moment.

In 2021, our director Eva Masterman began a PhD to investigate this changing landscape of clay practice. 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 centred this amazing material as a vehicle for community benefit and artistic production.

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 2026 as a new platform to provide a space to learn and thrive together, with the material we all know and love to guide us.

We believe that clay practice and education isn't disappearing, it's simply being re-made: in community studios, independent workshops, artist-led spaces, museums, galleries, adult learning settings, public programmes and informal networks of care. The question isn't whether clay still matters. It's how we build the structures, relationships and resources for it to thrive.

The Commons

A commons is a set of resources, collectively stewarded by a community under a co-created set of values. At The Clay Commons CIC, our resources are everything clay and community, the intangible knowledge and unseen 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.’

For a deeper dive into the research and practice that has informed the development of The Clay Commons CIC, The PhD thesis of our director is available on request. You can also access our State of Clay Education Report, written by our 2026 intern, Jialiang Ouyang, here:

coming soon