Cotton twists its way through the North. Here, fibres and patterns are embedded in the surfaces and stories that create social fabric and identity. And they can be found, woven delicately, into the work of ceramicist Hannah Sulek.

Sulek has craft in her blood. Her grandmother was a mill weaver, embroiderer and full-time mother to nine. “My family are from quite a small village just north of Manchester, and it’s just peppered with cotton mills,” Sulek says. “Growing up as a teenager, the only place that I could actually get a weekend job was working at the local textile museum. So that’s where me and my sisters used to work every weekend.”

She followed those threads into a textiles degree at MMU and later a job at Quarry Bank Mill where she wove cotton calico fabrics, some of which she now lays down under her slabs of clay. When she turned to clay, she took the mills with her. 

Clay and textiles

If you’ve visited the Textiles Gallery at Manchester’s Science and Industry Museum, you may have seen huge rows of bobbins unspooling thread to create a shimmering geometric haze of evenly dispersed lines, waiting to be woven tightly together. Take that image and transpose it onto Sulek’s work and you’ll find those same porcelain-white lines, now gently twisting around each form.

At her studio in Old Trafford, Sulek gestures towards a small dish that currently holds my scrunched, peppermint teabag. “That one in particular, that is based on part of a weaving loom,” she explains. “I call it the heddle dish.” Etched across the surface are a series of vanishing white lines imprinted from her own stamp of a heddle – the part of a loom that separates the threads. “I’ve got a few relic pieces that I’ve found on eBay in random places. And you can create your own stamps from them, just using a lump of porcelain. So you imprint it in the porcelain.”

“I use quite different tools compared to your regular potter,” she laughs. “I have a lot of knitting needles that I use. I prefer using metals to score through the clay because they create a much cleaner line. And I also use the knitting needles for measuring the depth of my clay.” As all skilled knitters know, each needle is helpfully labelled with its width in millimetres to give a perfectly consistent depth for each object. “I think every potter has their own tool palette, and knitting needles definitely top of the list of mine.” 

While finding tools from around the house is common practice for potters, this particular set reflects Sulek’s textiles background. “Most people will just go to the kitchen and find what they can use in their homes. I went to my sewing box and thought, ‘what can I use here?’ That was the most natural thing.”

Close to home

Sulek has also stayed local for her clay.

“It’s a terracotta clay that I find locally here, that is local to my own back garden,” she says. “You can make beautiful earthenware or slipware with it. But I have pushed it a little bit further.” She uses small amounts as a decorative slip, firing it at high temperatures. Looking at her dishes, they don’t have the normal rufous glow you expect from terracotta. “It’s got a slightly different tone of brown to it than terracotta,” explains Sulek. “It’s much more orange.” 

The tone is different and it brings its own personality from being harvested at home. “You’ve got the impurities of it being locally dug, it hasn’t really been treated very much. Sometimes those impurities are the most beautiful things that occur in the glaze, and you get tones that you can probably relate more to ancient Korean and Chinese glazes that you’re just not going to get in either artificial or store-bought materials.”

As well as unexpected additions, she enjoys the process of gathering and discovering as she experiments with clay. “I think, as a potter, having knowledge of where you’re sourcing your materials from, where that’s come from, is really important. Just having that respect that you’re firing the earth, and that’s been here a lot longer than we have and will hopefully continue to be so.”

The process

Sulek begins her process by marking her clay, scoring it to inlay with porcelain. Once it’s dried sufficiently, she rolls it out to her desired thickness, regularly rotating and shifting the slab. The surface of her rolled-out clay undulates with gentle waves, echoing the folds that appear in the twisted cotton cloth beneath it. “Once I start rolling the work out, the marks stretch and move,” Sulek says, easing the rolling pin up and down. “And that’s the part that I really enjoy.”

When it’s the right thickness, she will carefully cut it out to start building pieces. “Once I see how the marks have fallen, I’ll select areas that I’ll use for the pots.” Discarded clay is placed to one side to be reused or become Christmas decorations.

“I very much like a flat surface to work with, and then I often think of the form after,” reflects Sulek. This inversion of the usual approach is far more time-consuming while she waits for the clay to dry enough to be workable, but enables her to create the angular forms that are a hallmark of her pieces. Clean lines on both the surfaces and the outlines.

Although Sulek learned how to throw pots, the wheel wasn’t the right tool for her. “I felt slightly more restricted by it. I just wanted a big table, and I wanted to cut out the pieces, put them together and form my own constructions in that way. I suppose it’s like pattern cutting and laying out all your different pieces of fabric.”

Aesthetics and inspiration

Sulek’s style references textiles and elegant Scandinavian potters like Gertrud Vasegaard and Anne Mette Hjortshøj. But her richest well of inspiration comes from her own history. ”I’ve tried to channel a soft industrialism in my approach to my making, but also in the forms and the colours that I really like to come through in the work. So it’s very much the aesthetics of the mill environment that I’ve tried to embed into the surfaces that I produce.”

This ethos is why she chooses to laboriously hand-build each piece. It also enables her to bring her textiles degree into play. “The reason that I leaned more into the hand-building is because you can very much treat the clay as you would a piece of cloth, and whether that’s through a printed approach, or you create a raised surface, the possibilities are endless.”

Lines trace across all the surfaces of her work, an echo of the kind of repetitive embroidery that she used to stitch. The linearity of her glaze and embedded porcelain are both a kind of repeated mark-making. Sulek mixes clean lines with organic curves that appear like a wash of tidal foam gently disintegrating after the waves have broken on the shore.

These gentler lines also appeared at the mills. “With the spinning mule, inevitably there was cotton waste at the end of the day, and wisps of cotton that fell onto the floor. In these environments, I used to be constantly taking inspiration from the floor and the way that cotton strands would fall. It was just so delicate, but in this heavily industrial environment.”

Sulek smiles. “Simple cotton wisps falling on the oily wooden floorboards were just as inspiring as some of the machinery to me. There’s something really humbling in a strand of cotton because it’s what that entire process was about, from taking cotton from a bale through to this strand that essentially had this twist put into it to give it strength. And that’s what clothed the world.”

Sulek is now part of the Manchester Ceramics Collective, a largely female collective of 13 potters. This has enabled her to grow and develop in her practice.

“I think there’s a huge generosity in being a potter,” she says. “The essence of sharing knowledge, sharing space, and it’s a practice that involves so many processes. It’s certainly a medium that keeps you on your toes and you’re constantly questioning and constantly feeling curious about the next thing you might discover.”

By Rowan Twine

All photos by Rowan Twine

 

Hannah Sulek Ceramics