Getting to know Vancouver Pottery Artist Robyn Williams
In celebration of International Women’s Day, for the month of March we’ll be featuring four of our fabulous female artists. This week, for our second Women in Art Spotlight, we’re featuring Vancouverite Robyn Williams, founder of Willowcraft Pottery.
Pottery for Beginners
Some people strike oil, some strike gold, Robyn struck clay.
When Robyn was a child in her rural Australian home, there was a drought on the dairy farm. Drilling for water, her family accidentally came upon a clay deposit. This was a chance for Robyn and her sister to get creative.
“We made all sorts of things in our studio,” Robyn says.
Her studio: the old flat bed of a truck. “We made little bowls, a lot of coil pots, probably figurines. I remember them all sitting along the window sill in the dairy.”
Robyn went on to study pottery from grade seven to high school, and cleaned a pottery studio as her first job. “It was just down the road from the farm, and I would ride my bike or horse.”
But as a teenager, Robyn diverted to the performing and visual arts. Despite living in the highly creative Kyabram, Australia, with it’s healthy ceramics industry, she didn’t think it could be a career for her. She wouldn’t come back to pottery until she was studying, of all things, theology.
Finding Similarities Between Pottery and Theology
Robyn moved to Vancouver for school when she felt she needed an outlet. “I had the urge to do something tactile. I was doing my MA, and I wanted something to be the opposite of that MA.”
Friends of hers had a community studio in East Van, and so she started tagging along.
But Robyn found that theology and pottery didn’t seem so far apart, and eventually pottery found its way into her thesis.
“Interestingly enough: my interest in theology is embodiment,” she says. Robyn wanted to explore the bodily participation in faith, and challenge the notion the body is separate from worship. “The reality of life is that we exist in these physical bodies and if we neglect them not much thinking gets done. It was a physical liturgy.”
Working with Vancouver’s Social Enterprise Just Potters
When Robyn wrapped up her masters in 2008, the manager of the JustPotters asked if she would do piece work for them. JustPotters is a social enterprise that runs a successful pottery studio while helping employ people who face barriers. Robyn leapt at the opportunity. She was firing pieces, maintaining the kiln, and helping with product design when the team decided she would become senior potter.
“There was no job interview. It was one of those jobs that just grew as my role became bigger.”
Working with JustPotters has changed the way she defines barriers.
“It’s been such a learning experience. I’ve had mental health issues of my own and I think the notion of being skilled at something isn’t reliant on your life being together, or perfect, or evening manageable. You can be a skilled professional and still have barriers.”
Robyn says whereas mental health issues are often stigmatized, JustPotters doesn’t excluded people with challenges.
“We can accomodate that while still treating you like the professional that you are. There isn’t this sense that because you have mental illness, or you’ve struggled with housing, that excludes you from participating in society economically.”
Starting a Pottery Business
In 2013, Robyn created her own line of pottery, Willowcraft, continuing her study of the spirituality of food and drink and “the culture of hospitality.”
“There’s something deeply human and deeply sacred about the way we feed our bodies,” says Robyn. “We express so much love for friends and family this way. You serve good food on good plates. I think it’s all wrapped up together in the presentation of food and drink.”
Robyn’s favourite things to make are teapots, because they make for an excellent challenge. “Every skill you need in throwing and handbuilding you have to use in making a teapot. It’s the ultimate challenge to make something that pours really well and looks good on a shelf.”
She also likes big projects, but recognises they have a smaller market. Her next project is to make a font (a basin serving as a receptacle for baptismal water) for her youngest daughter’s baptism. The font she made for her first daughter is now in a friend’s garden, but this one may be purchased by the church.
A highlight for Robyn was having her carafes put in every room of the Four Seasons in Whistler. It was one of her most intimidating jobs to date, but says it was an honour to be one of many local people they choose to feature.
Working between JustPotters and her own company Willowcraft has also been a rewarding career path in terms of spending time with her two daughters.
“I’m super flexible in my job. I can spend a lot of time with my kids so they don’t need to be in daycare,” Robyn says.
“I still do academic work. In a way it was an apology for manual labour over a life. But it’s both/and. We can’t be all in our head all the time, nor can we be all in our body all the time. If I wanted to sum up why I keep doing this, it’s that at the end of the day there will be fifty or sixty things I can look at and say, ‘I made that.’ And that is increasingly rare.”
Shop Robyn’s pottery on our website, or visit us in store for our full selection!
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Reposted with permission from Bird on a Wire Creations, Vancouver.