Last week was operation maker’s mark. A maker’s mark is what is says it is, something to show who made the piece. Maker’s marks can be found on all sorts of items, not just ceramics, but also furniture and jewellery, in a similar way to how an artist might sign a painting. In pottery, the mark is usually impressed into the clay at the leather hard stage – the period after throwing when it is dry enough to handle and remove any excess clay but before it is dry enough for its first firing.
My maker’s mark started with a simple set of initials scratched with a pin tool on my first few pots made in class. At that point it was not a matter of great deliberation, since the only purpose of marking our pots was to distinguish one wobbly looking effort from another.
As I got a better, and started to sell or gift pots I was pleased with, I felt I needed something a little more original and shifted to something a bit more stylised – an interlocking of my initials H and T. I also upgraded from a scratchy pin tool to a more robust tool once belonging to my grandfather. I’ve no idea what the original purpose of this tool is, but it’s got a nice wooden handle and thick prong on the end and is great for drawing initials in leather hard clay.
Since deciding to set up Ullswater Ceramics I’ve been looking for something to represent this phase of my making journey. Having made an rather oversized prototype last year, I spent a happy hour last weekend rolling and cutting some rectangles of clay and then drying them until I could carve my new mark into them with a pin tool – two wiggly lines to represent the waves on the surface of Ullswater. Now I just need to fire them to the bisque stage and hopefully I will be able to achieve a consistent maker’s mark on all my future work.