On taking leaps, making fire, and finding home in the materials

Sammantha Cree arrived in London in late 2024 without a studio, without a clear path, and without any certainty that moving her practice here would work. She’d come from Sydney, where her focus had shifted increasingly toward teaching, and she was ready to find out what happened when making came first.

She found her way to In Production at Turning Earth in East London, one of the few facilities in the country built specifically for production potters working at scale. She fires with a gas kiln, one of the very few makers we stock who does. She works with Shino and wood ash glazes, with a clay blend she developed to solve a specific problem with a temperamental new kiln, and with the coastal tones of a childhood in New South Wales that she carried across the world without quite meaning to.

Fodder was one of the first shops she visited when she arrived. We’re very glad she came back.

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F | You’re Australian, now making in East London at Turning Earth In Production. How did you end up here, and what does London give your practice that somewhere else might not?

SC | I am originally from Sydney. I moved here in late 2024, the decision came about because of changes to visa permissions between the UK and Australia. It’s a bit funny really; there wasn’t a clear path for ceramics here. I didn’t really know if moving my practice here would be viable, but I decided to take the leap and, luckily, with a lot of hard work, it’s coming together.

London offers so many things that Sydney couldn’t, from the foundations of my practice, the studio, to the frequency and affordability of art markets. And then there are places like Fodder. There just aren’t as many stores who will buy wholesale direct from artists; a lot of shops rely on consignment, which in many ways makes things less secure for the artist.

In Sydney I was much more focused on progressing as a ceramics educator. At times, making my own work took the back seat because of term commitments.

Image credit Leanne Benson

F | Almost every ceramicist we stock works with an electric kiln. You use a gas kiln. For anyone who doesn’t know the difference, can you explain what that actually means for the work?

SC | In its simplest explanation, a gas kiln allows us to achieve a reduction firing. This is a manual firing where the person operating the kiln will, at a certain point, begin to close down the oxygen supply to the kiln, creating a reduced oxygen environment in the chamber. This forces the flame to source its oxygen from the clay body and the glazes, causing them to go through a change that wouldn’t be able to occur in an oxidation firing.

F | Shino is a glaze with a long history in Japanese ceramics. What drew you to it, and what does it do that other glazes can’t?

SC | I think everyone is drawn to a Shino glaze for the same reason. It’s earthy, it’s unpredictable, and it provides a beautiful variation of colour and texture. You can achieve a lot with just one recipe, and depending on what other components it’s paired with, you can end up with two completely different results. Which can be both good and bad when you’re trying to make forty of the same thing.

I was lucky to study at a college with access to multiple gas kilns and reduction glazes. A large part of studying was developing glazes and understanding how to successfully operate a gas kiln, which gave me a lot of time to explore different surfaces. But I didn’t really arrive at the way I use the glaze in my collection now until a few years after studying, while I was working in other studios as a technician and starting to learn about wood firings. I was lucky to be invited to help a very talented Australian ceramicist with one of her wood firings, and it was from there that I started to experiment with Shino and wood ash.

F | The Toasted Clay pieces are a personal favourite of mine from the collection. The clay blend, raw on the outside and glazed within. Can you tell us about that clay and what that contrast does for the finished piece?

SC | This clay blend’s origin story is a bit practical, to be honest. When I first arrived at the studio here in London, they had recently purchased a new gas kiln, and with all gas kilns you need to work a few things out to find their groove. Unfortunately, the kiln we have is a little bit tricky.

Initially there were areas of the kiln that weren’t achieving the level of reduction that other glazes and clays of mine require, so I reached for a few clay bodies and began blending to see if I could find something that would help make use of those areas. And luckily it really helped to put the final piece of the puzzle into the collection. I love being able to showcase the clay. Its texture is really suited to remaining unglazed, and the contrast of the smooth matte white glaze helps to accentuate the form while still allowing it to remain the most important part of the piece.

F | Your work feels very rooted in the natural world, in landscape and organic texture. Are there specific places or materials you find yourself returning to for that?

SC | Home really plays a part in the collection I’m working with now, which is funny because it kind of came together as soon as I left Australia. I lived in a very urban area of Sydney for the last decade, but most of my childhood was spent on the coast in New South Wales, an area that has access to a bit of everything in terms of nature: beaches, creeks, lakes and the bush. A lot of the tones and colours feel like little pieces of that region.

While I can’t physically return there right now, some of the materials I use in my work are naturally occurring everywhere, wood ash and rust, and in many ways it really helps the work to vary and grow depending on the source of those materials. It creates a sense of change within my processes and results and really grounds parts of the collection to the place it’s being created.

F | You’ve taught ceramics as well as made. Does teaching change how you think about your own practice, or how you explain what you’re doing?

SC | Teaching really changed the way I went about my own practice. For a few years I was able to teach at a range of levels, and I think when you start teaching people who are really growing with their own practice, you eventually have to figure out how to explain the steps of some of the more difficult processes. In many ways, this starts to change the way you process the steps when you’re working on your own things. It leads to a much deeper understanding. There’s also a side of teaching where you have to help fix a mistake or save a piece on the wheel that’s on the brink of flopping over, and those moments really test your abilities.

F | For your launch collection at Fodder you’ve made some summer pieces we’re really excited about, wine coolers that double as vases and berry bowl colanders for all that city foraging! When you’re designing something like that, something with a clear job to do and outside of your usual range, how do you approach the form?

SC | Usually I start with a bit of a daydream, expanding on a form I already have or can already make, and then try to build on that to help the piece feel rooted in the style that my collection exists in. I usually don’t do any drawings before I experiment. I just get on the wheel and start to explore the form through making it. This can result in a few different prototypes for one product, but I find it leads to a better sense of connection to the form and the final piece.

F | In Production at Turning Earth is an incredible facility for production potters, a proper community of makers all working at that level together. What’s the reality of that day to day?

SC | In Production is a great space; we need more spaces like it. There is no one reality really. With so many artists working in so many ways, it’s an environment that’s always changing.

F | Can you tell us a little about what a gas firing actually involves, and what you’re looking for when the kiln opens? How do you know when the firing has done what you hoped?

SC | When you’re firing a gas kiln, the integrity of the firing begins with the pack. You’re usually trying to make sure it’s consistent throughout, and you might have some products that need to be in certain places in the kiln to avoid or embrace the flame. At the same time, you’re going to be placing pyrometric cones throughout the kiln, some placed by the spy holes and others throughout so you can assess them later.

Once the kiln has started, it’s going to climb in temperature over a few hours. During this time you’ll be increasing the amount of gas to help the climb, and the damper and primary air points will be completely open. As the kiln reaches the desired temperature, those oxygen supply points will start to be decreased, forcing the flame to source its oxygen from the clay body and the glazes. At this point flame will start to escape from the damper and spy holes, and the kiln is likely to stall and hold around that temperature. We’ll hold it here for two to three hours, continuing to assess the flame to make sure the atmosphere is staying in reduction.

After this time we’ll start to creep the damper open, allowing oxygen back into the kiln and bringing it to a neutral atmosphere. Once the kiln climbs close to its final temperature, we’ll start to remove the peeps to check on the cones. When we see our desired cone bending, we can turn everything off and close the damper to allow the kiln to cool slowly over a day or two.

We have a good idea of whether the firing was successful by monitoring flame colour during reduction and by relying on the pyrometric cones to reach temperature. But once we can open it up, we’ll be looking at the colour of the clay bodies and glazes to see if they look and feel like we were hoping, and assessing the cones that were throughout other areas of the kiln to help us understand what happened in those areas.

Image credit Thea Elder

F | This is your first time stocking with us. What made Fodder feel like the right place for your work?

SC | Fodder was one of the first stores I followed on social media and eventually visited in 2024 when I first arrived. At the time I hadn’t even found a studio space. I was just trying to see what was out there, but after following along for a few months, I noticed how much care and attention is taken into making sure each artist and their pieces had a mention regardless of how big or small their allocation is in the curation. I found so many other ceramic artists through the newsletter and socials. I felt like I could see that there was a deep appreciation for functional ceramics and the pursuit of integrating them into the day-to-day.

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Sammantha has spent the last two years building a practice from scratch in a new city, finding her studio, her kiln, her materials, her stockists. The work that’s arrived on our shelves is the result of all of that, ash and rust and coastal tones carried quietly from the other side of the world and fired into something that feels completely at home here. We’re so glad she found us.

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