Curriculum Vital

摘要

The label 'comprehensive' does not do justice to the incredible amount of hard work put in by the pupils and staff at the Holt School in Wokingham, Berkshire, where I have the privilege of being amongst those teaching in the art department. Having spent only a couple of years teaching I am relatively new to the profession. Before, I spent a happy three years at Loughborougii University on a ceramics degree, then a memorable stint at Winchcombe Pottery, time at Dartington Pottery and an instructive few months with Richard Phethean. During my training I had been taught by some of the best contemporary makers in this country, gaining skills and tricks that I knew would benefit my own work. Yet when I came to produce my own work after some five years of intensive training, I felt somewhat hollow. This hollowness, I soon realised, came not from the work I was producing but the company I was keeping, namely just myself. Being a social creature, solitude was something I had never contemplated and I found it unbearable. Bowls and teapots are poor conversationalists and I soon became depressed with the job that I had dreamt of doing since I was sixteen. Teaching seemed a possible solution. I entered a profession that, in the eyes of school pupils, transforms the formerly everyday skills of kiln firing and throwing into alchemy and magic. Here I soon found the additional job satisfaction that I had been missing. Before starting to teach, however, I had not realised that ceramics had dwindled so much in secondary schools. When experienced teachers leave, their valuable clay skills are hard to replace, resulting in many schools cutting back or closing down ceramics facilities. Yet the resourcefulness that art teachers possess in overcoming technical problems results in new techniques emerging, often innovative and new, sometimes seemingly bizarre, which enlarges conventional teaching methods. As such, my traditional knowledge of ceramics has been expanded vastly by contact with my colleagues and pupils.