This week we spoke with Edmund Davies the London-based potter behind the newest addition to our shop: two beautiful styles of wheel-thrown stoneware candleholders.

Permanant Collection: Do you have a so-called 'permanent collection' possession—something that you think about often or that provokes you creatively on a daily basis?

Edmund Davies: A nice holey flint.

P.C.: Tell us the story of this stone.

E.D.: I’m a chronic beachcomber, inculcated I suppose as a child by my mother. Stones with holes in them, specifically, but also ones with an undefinable personal aesthetic merit— this stone fits both categories. It comes from a beach in Norfolk next to my boyfriend’s family home, where the flints are washed out of the muddy cliffs and pile up on the beach. I was specifically looking for a faux Barbara Hepworth, but this one stole my heart instead. 

P.C.: I love that. Nature is full of endless wonderment. Could you share a source of creative inspiration?

E.D.: My main inspiration is in the making, I suppose, trying to achieve some sort of state of flow to allow new forms to appear while at the wheel. That, and looking at historical pots and vessels in museums and galleries. I’m recently obsessed with Romano-British glass.

P.C.: Can you describe a current project or a current obsession? 

E.D.: I’m currently working on a new body of work, looking to produce part reduction fired terracotta, showing the classic orange, but also flashes of almost singed metallic grey, where the fire has taken oxygen from the body of the pot. Inspired by the colours of the smoke-fired terracotta of Oaxaca, mixed with the feel of vapours moving irregularly through a kiln that I’ve seen achieved in historical and contemporary gas fired and particularly salt glazed pots.