Harriet Coleridge

Many years ago, Harriet was inspired by an article by Dick Lehmann about carbon trap glazes. She has been exploring this intriguing glaze ever since. She believes that all the potters who work with carbon trap seek different qualities and achieve quite distinctive effects even though they may use the same recipe and fire to the same temperature in the same kind of kiln. The glaze is unusually responsive to the atmosphere in the kiln and even to the weather as it dries before firing.

Nowadays, Harriet works with four or five different carbon trap shinos on clays with varying amounts of iron, from Limoges porcelain to the black clay of St. Amand. The pots are fired in a fiercely reducing atmosphere of 1280°C. Harriet mostly seeks the dramatic contrast that one can obtain from the charcoal of the carbon trapping and the amber comet trails of liquid wax, enhanced by rivulets of rose ash.

Since her invaluable apprenticeship at Aldermaston Pottery, Harriet has had studios in Hampshire, America and France. For the last twenty years she has been living and working in Oxfordshire.