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POTTERS

potters

GUILD Sse

Volume 40 No. 9

of BRITISH
COLUMBIA

a Aging Sensibly or How to Keep Potting in Spite of our Bodies

NEWSLETTER

It's interesting how, as we get older, the idea of what is ‘old’ changes. However, what is in the mind

and what the body will tolerate get increasingly out of syne.

Despite the physical activity of potting being up there with gardening as a long-time help with over-
all fitness, it can be physically taxing. I like to think I'll be like Lucie Rie at 90 in that wonderful film

Car kiln and transom crane

of her being interviewed by David Attenborough when an alarmed David
leaps up as Dame Lucie - tiny and frail - almost disappears into her top-
loading kiln in order to retrieve a pot.

My physiotherapist tells me that I'm paying for youthful, past abuses of
my body, so now that I'm older I try to be smarter in the hope that I'll last
longer.

Some studio devices reflect this philosophy. As a maker of big things my
first major reconsideration was to rebuild the kiln as a car kiln so that I
didn't have to crawl inside and handle shelves in a cramped, cantilevered
position. As the new kiln was a bit larger and used the heavy silicone car-
bide shelves from the old Crane kiln, loading these was not easy - even for
two people. A couple of pulleys, some rope and sliding door hardware
made a simple, low-tech, fixed transom crane that combines with moving
the kiln trolley to line up the shelf stacks. Loading and unloading 22lb
shelves is a breeze single-handed.

After turning over large planters and heavy platters did no favours to my
forearms, I designed a ‘pot flipper’. It looks a bit Heath-Robinson but is a
cheap and low-tech device using some scrap plywood and bit of piano
hinge. In the restricted space of the studio it has to fold up out of the way
when not in use.

The physio also blames repetitive movements over many years as a physi-
cal problem waiting to happen. It seems to make sense to understand the
ergonomics of a task (throwing and turning on the wheel in particular) but
to actually do the job inefficiently - building a mountain of pre-weighed
balls of clay and then sitting at the wheel until they're all gone - is a thing
of the past. Now, a much smaller mountain gives the opportunity to get
up, stretch, walk across the studio to collect more clay before starting
again, compromising the speed of production in favour of a potentially
longer working life.

If you have any low-tech labour or body saving devices, send them in. We
need all the help we can get!

Photos courtesy Keith Rice Jones Keith and Celia Rice-Jones