studio dispatch no. 4: eleven months ago I went to Malawi
Last time I wrote, I was on a plane to Malawi to travel for my day job to visit tea farmers in the southern part of the country. My colleague and friend spent a few days afterward travelling around the country, and we visited Dedza Pottery before coming back to the U.K, staying overnight in their lodges (which had incredible handmade tiling and sinks that were different in each room!).
Dedza produces all sorts of stoneware ceramics, and we were able to take a tour of their facilities including their process for mixing their clay body. My delayed update is only a reflection of my inability to get back into a routine (dispatches) when knocked off, not the visit! Here are a few pics of my favourite parts of the tour and pots we saw. I’ve added a small black pouring jug (see last set of images below), a hand-painted mug, and a zebra print candlestick holder (!!) to my personal collection from this trip.
The studio space is absolutely massive, and the potters are specialized- some work as throwers, others as decorators, others as glazers and kiln techs. Obviously I was very interested in peeking at what the throwers were up to, and there were a lot of vases and mug forms being thrown when we visited.
One incredibly interesting thing we learned that I’ve not been able to get out of my head for eleven months is that Dedza has an agreement to hand-throw all of the electrical bobbins for the national grid in the country… Meaning that for all parts of Malawi that are connected to the grid, the bobbins on the power pylons are hand-thrown and finished by a local potter, not even slipcast! There is a shelf of these bobbins ready for glaze firing on the left hand side of the fourth row above (on mobile- second from right image in the middle row above for desktop users).
Better a late update than never, and it was very cool to be able to add on a pottery visit to a work trip. Some day soon I’ll also tell you about the cool pots I found in Ghana on a banana trip this year, too (but no promises on timelines as we saw how that worked out last time).
