Producing the Goods

Powdermills Pottery

Remote and isolated, almost at the centre of Dartmoor, stand the old range of stone buildings that includes Powdermills Pottery. There are few trees here, the surrounding landscape is made up of boggy grass, gorse, gnarled hawthorns, grey stone walls, standing stones and barrows.

Until she was 30, Joss Hibbs was an insurance manager living in East London. Her “mid-life crisis” as she puts it came during a meeting at work when someone asked, jokingly, whether they had all dreamt of being insurance managers when they were children. She realised she had always wanted to become a potter. She took voluntary redundancy and started a Ceramic Design course at Harrow Tech. While she was there, she and her husband Martin went on holiday to Devon. They saw the sign for Powdermills Pottery from the road and it was his suggestion that they have a look. She thought it would be full of Dartmoor pixies for sale like the other crafts shops they’d just passed.

In fact a creative and talented potter, Nick Collins was living there and selling his work. Joss bought a pot and ended up driving down there every mid-term and occasional weekends to learn from him. She spent the summer holiday of her first year at Harrow entirely at Powdermills learning not only from Collins but also from Sven Bayer, another well-known potter, who was working nearby at Sheepwash at Okehampton. Halfway through the second year of her degree course she decided to give up studying and do pottery full-time.

In autumn of 1998, Collins phoned to say that he was giving up his tenancy (the Duchy of Cornwall owns the buildings and land) and asked if she would be interested in taking it on. The following February, Martin gave up his job, they sold their house and took over the pottery.

Apart from Nick Collins and Sven Bayer, Joss pays homage to Brian Sutherland, a potter working in Kent who taught her – by letter – how to make glazes from “found material”. This could be local river gravel, feldspar (the white granite from the top of Hay Tor), ash from the woodburner, all ground up and painted onto the clay pots before firing. The slogan on the brochure for Powdermills Pottery says it all, “Take a piece of the moor home with you”.

Joss does six firings of the kiln a year and says that but for the elements she would do eight. “The weather on Dartmoor can be extreme. It can be impossible to keep the wood dry. The rain swirls and is rarely vertical. At one firing the kiln reached the right temperature but suddenly the clouds opened and there was a deluge. The temperature plummeted and affected the kiln”. Ideally the kiln should cool gradually. Joss describes the result of the torrent as “Insipid, the pots had no firing marks”.

Firing the pots in the kiln is an exhausting process lasting between 55 and 85 hours, day and night. The wood-fuelled kiln needs stoking every ten minutes – two friends help out - and the temperature should be a constant 1350 degrees Centigrade. Wood ash melts the silica in the clay to make glass which forms the shiny glaze. Granite gives a toasted colour, from toffee brown to reds, according to the heat and the amount of oxygen. The glaze inside the pots is in shades of greengage.

The kiln itself is a primitive, shack-like building in which a thousand pots are fired each year. A local hill farmer with a saw mill provides Joss with off-cuts of pine, cedar, and larch. Oak from Devon is burnt towards the end as it cools slowly. A ton and half of clay is used for each firing.

A barn, one of the huddle of old grey stone buildings at Powdermills, is the showroom for Joss’s work and that of other craftspeople she has chosen to display. Everything is locally made mostly from clay, willow, wood and metal. There are attractive jackets and waistcoats made by Claire Winter from the fleece of Jacob’s sheep and copies of a remarkable DVD of Dartmoor music in which Nigel Shaw plays an assortment of 13 flutes (made by himself) within the replica Bronze Age hut he has erected in his garden. Prices range up to £300. Joss’s own pots cost from £5 for a small dish up to £75 for a big plate or bread crock.

Leana Pooley for Common Ground, 2007

Contact: Joss Hibb
Powdermills Pottery, Postbridge, Dartmoor, Devon PL20 6SP
+44(0)1822 880263
<www.powdermillspottery.com>