Anna's feats of clay

CERAMIC artist Anna Whitehouse has travelled the world, living for a time in France and the States. But it is from her first home, the small, eccentric terraced house in Harrogate where she grew up, that she now creates her stunning sculptures and vessels.

Anna has come full circle in more ways than one. Since moving back into the family home, which had lain derelict for five years, she has discovered it was built on a bed of clay, the material she works with every day. Further investigation revealed that there used to be a large brickworks on the playing fields at the end of the road in the late 1800s, the terraced housing here built for the workers and their families.

For Anna, who studied ceramics at Manchester University, establishing her studio in this very spot is as much a spiritual as a geographical homecoming. Now she is seeking funding for a major community art project to celebrate this little-known part of the town’s industrial history about which very little has been written. She plans a huge sculpture, mimicking the top of the long demolished 60ft tall brickworks chimney, with sections of large pipework laid to make public seating. She hopes as many members of the local community as possible will take part, each helping to make individually-named bricks to cover the sculpture.

The giant public artwork, which she is hoping the local council and arts council will help fund, is far removed from her usual work, rounded organic pottery and sculptures inspired by nature, particularly the North Yorkshire coast, and tinged with her signature turquoise-coloured glazes. But both have one thing in common – the damp, unprepossessing clay which becomes transformed, in Anna’s hands, into works of art.

It is a substance which held little attraction for her when she studied art at school. “I never thought I would work with clay. I made a giraffe out of it in primary school, which cracked when it dried. Its legs started to fall off and it looked very unhappy. None of the teachers knew how to work with clay, I never thought you could make anything good out of it.”

At Manchester University, Anna studied 3d design and went on to specialise in ceramics. “I learnt how to work with clay and discovered that all the things I had been sketching and making from wood and metal fitted this material.” She made a series of organic, slug-like shapes, inspired by natural forms. “I found the process of working with clay gave movement to things," she says. "It had life in it. I was hooked.”

Childhood holidays on the North Yorkshire coast, where she collected rocks and fossils from the beaches at Robin Hood’s Bay, Port Mulgrave and Staithes, inspired her and she began to incorporate the colours and textures in her work. She made plaster casts of the tide lines on the beach and scooped up some of the iron-rich sand to mock it up back in her studio at university. When she flicked some of it onto her bowls as an experiment, she was delighted by the rich yellows, caramelised browns and greens that emerged in the final sea blue glaze. “It was lovely putting something back into my work from the area that inspired a huge chunk of my childhood," she says.

As a student, Anna visited museums to research the fossilised skeletons of ichthyosaurs and other sea creatures. She also examined Victorian egg collections and corals. “I was inspired by the repeating mathematical patterns within nature.” She created a range of porcelain egg shapes, using the patterns and textures she had studied to create tactile pieces. “People automatically want to pick them up and feel them and touch them," she says.

It was after university, after she had exhibited her work in shows throughout the country, that her parents suggested she move back to the old family home, which they had never been able to sell since moving to a larger house around the corner.

As the eldest of six children, Anna grew up here, although her father’s work as a researcher and developer for Nestle also took them abroad for long periods. After renting their old home out to a friend for 14 years, it lay derelict for five years. “It was a shell, just awful,” Anna recalls. But, somehow, it felt like home. “The smell of the place took me straight back to being a kid," says Anna.

She set up a temporary gallery in the front room when she took part in the North Yorkshire Open Studios event. “You opened the front door into a beautifully painted room with a new floor. But beyond that, the rest of the house was a building site.”

A school science cabinet retrieved from a skip and the old family piano were used as display units while Anna hung on the wall a large black and white photograph of the rocks at Port Mulgrave, the inspiration behind much of her work. It was framed in a large piece of glass, also rescued from a skip.

The exhibition went well but, immediately afterwards, Anna set to restoring the rest of the house and didn’t touch clay for a year. “Everything needed doing, but it meant I could make it how I wanted," she says. She made the blue-glazed clay sink in the bathroom. “I couldn’t believe how expensive they were, for something that wasn’t that nice, so thought I would make my own. It looks lovely with water in it.”

Once the bathroom was rebuilt, there was no room for a bath, so she created a huge shower, with a polish concrete floor, stained charcoal black to look like slate, then embedded with stones and pebbles. “It looks like a big piece of slate from Port Mulgrave, with rocks and fossils set in it, as if they have eroded over the years.”

She finally moved in in 2011, having turned what would have been the dining room into her studio, complete with kiln. “That was the last thing that got done. I hadn’t touched clay for a year and spent a good few weeks getting the feel of the clay again before the muscle memory eventually kicked in.”

As well as creating her domestic and garden sculptures, which she exhibits in galleries throughout the country, and through Open Studios, Anna runs regular pottery workshops from her home. She only discovered the rich seam of clay underneath the building when she began to dig up the concrete yard to improve the view from her studio. “I wanted to plant things to look out on and discovered the whole of my garden is this Oatlands clay. After firing it in my kiln, I can hold it up to the front of my house and see a perfect colour match in the bricks.”

Following some investigation and an appeal for information in her local paper, she eventually unearthed maps and documented first-hand accounts relating to the brick works.

Anna’s street was the old access road into the Harrogate Red Brick Company, which opened around 1875 when the area was known as Brickfields. One resident remembered being let out of school early in 1936 to watch the chimney being demolished, about ten years after the brick works was finally closed.

“The reason this area was developed was because of this key natural material," she says. "The occupants of these houses would have been working with clay every day, just like I do now, and the houses are all made out of these bricks. The project just landed at my feet and it seemed mad not to do anything with it. I was born here and went to school here. It just seemed an amazing bit of history. Then I was back in this house over 100 years later working with clay again.”

W: www.anna-whitehouse.co.uk