Gift Focus inc Attire Accessories - January / February 2021

89 COMPANY PROFILE Button up Stockwell Ceramics supplies a range of brooches, earrings, necklaces, cufflinks and hanging decorations, and talks to Louise Prance about the company’s dedication to remaining small but successful I  When did you start up and why? I started Stockwell Ceramics in 1989 to make thrown domestic pottery on a small scale. I have always been a maker and wanted to turn my making into an income. My interest was in large decorative pieces using coloured slips and glazes with much of the decoration completed before the first biscuit firing. Having studied painting at university and trained in a pottery workshop before that, I was always torn between the three-dimensional form of the vessel and the two-dimensional painted surface. For this reason, I started to produce tiles but the process for both large ceramic pieces and panels of tiles was often both long and laborious. When a huge pot failed in the final firing with no hope of retrieval, as it often did, it was a hard experience to cast it aside and start again. Certainly not a recipe for earning a living! I continued to struggle with this for a few years together with making mugs, plates, bowls and other domestic pottery, which gradually expanded and gathered momentum together with my interest in tiles. I continued to experiment with slips and glazes always looking for new effects. Then one day I was taking the small discs that I used for glaze tests out of the latest glaze firing when it occurred to me that if I made holes in them, they would be like buttons. I tried it out and it worked. Hey presto, the birth of my button making future! It was not, however, quite as simple as that. I tested the “buttons” in the washing machine and found to my amazement that they survived even after several washes. I then received a postcard from a friend showing a collection of buttons made by the well-known potter Lucy Rie. These were a great inspiration together with the discovery that there were many other people making ceramic buttons too. I started to run the button making alongside the domestic pottery on quite a small scale. This of course was in pre internet days when websites were not even thought of. The buttons were a pleasant change