Meet the Maker: Lily Pearmain

We meet south-east London ceramicist Lily Pearmain, whose handmade espresso cups and oil pourer have recently joined our collection, to talk about happy accidents, the pleasure of repetition and why she prefers to let her hands do the thinking.

Lily Pearmain does not think of herself as a designer. Ask what a pot will look like and she's more likely to tell you that she won't know until it comes out of the kiln.

Her days begin early. She's in the studio by around half past eight, overalls on, radio playing and a cup of tea close at hand. After a few moments standing with her hands on her hips, surveying the day's work, she tries to get her hands into clay as quickly as possible. There's a reason for the hurry. "The second I sit down to do some emails or something, that's like three hours just immediately gone."

It isn't a path she planned. Lily had originally signed up for a jewellery-making class, despite not wearing much jewellery herself. When the organiser rang to explain there weren't enough people to run it, she was offered a place on a pottery course instead. Same evening, same price. Why not?

The class was full of women who'd been making pots for forty years and were, by Lily's account, largely there for a chat. This suited her perfectly. She'd found a creative outlet, some good company and, without quite realising it, the beginnings of a career.

Before pottery, Lily had worked as a baker. The early starts were exhausting, but the experience proved surprisingly useful. Both crafts involve doing the same thing over and over, learning through repetition and gradually getting better. "That's what bread is and that's what pots are," she says. "It's just perseverance."

What she loved about clay, though, was how forgiving it could be. A mistake could be recycled back into something useful, and there was no particular pressure to get things right straight away.

"I enjoyed being bad at something," she remembers. "It was quite fun."

That willingness to see where things lead has stayed with her. Rather than beginning with an exact drawing and working towards it, Lily prefers to let the clay have some say in the outcome.

"I see myself as another tool in the journey of a pot turning from a lump of clay into a pot," she explains.

There are choices at every stage, from preparing the clay to throwing, turning and glazing. Lily prefers to make them as she goes, responding to what's in front of her rather than forcing a pot into something it doesn't want to be.

She has one rule when experimenting: every piece must be seen through to the end, unless it's broken or fundamentally flawed. A bowl that feels a little too heavy at the wheel might otherwise have gone straight back into the reclaim, but turn or decorate it differently and it can become something quite unexpected.

Much of the work is left to her hands. The first pot of a session is rarely the best, Lily says, because she's still thinking too much. By the tenth, "it's just coming from my hands, it's not coming from my brain."

Her favourite days are those spent making a whole board of seventy or so pieces, until the work finds its rhythm and she can almost switch off.

You can see evidence of those hands in the finished pots. Lily likes them sturdy and substantial, the sort you feel comfortable reaching for every day. She has pots at home that are at least a hundred years old and still uses them, exactly as intended.

She often leaves the soft throwing lines made by her fingertips as she draws the clay upwards. Sometimes, there are fingerprints in the glaze, left where she's held a pot during the making. She has no particular desire to disguise them.

What she finds especially lovely is watching someone pick up one of her pots and instinctively place their own fingertips into the impressions she's left behind.

"It's like we're holding hands, but just through the medium of a pot," she says.

Once a pot leaves the studio, Lily tends to forget about it, already looking forward to making the next one. Her sister has something of an archive of her work going back ten years, including a few early attempts Lily now looks at rather less fondly.

But she loves the thought of her pots becoming part of somebody else's daily life, acquiring associations and memories that she could never give them herself. As she puts it, "they become part of someone else's life."

Her work has recently found a home in our collection, with a pair of handmade espresso cups in chocolate-brown glaze and soft ochre stripes, alongside an oil pourer with a gently irregular shape and richly speckled finish. Each piece varies a little from the next, just as you'd expect from Lily's way of working. They're made to be used, rather than kept for best.

At the end of a good day, Lily might have a hundred pots lined up neatly on boards, drying overnight before she returns to turn them the following morning.

She loves being able to see exactly what a day's work has produced. Even if it does come with a slight backache and the need for a hot bath.