Artists in Cornwall are often influenced by the landscape that surrounds them. Some take inspiration from it, some seek to capture and represent it at a moment in time, and some use it physically in their practice. Ceramicist Gail Cooper does all three.

With glazes that replicate the colours of the rocks and cliffs on the nearby coast, vase forms inspired by eroded pebbles or the area’s mining heritage, and her use of local St Agnes clay and coastal flora and seaweeds combed from the beach at the end of the road in her saggar firings, a sense of place is prevalent throughout all of Gail’s pieces.

Gail works out of a small studio in her back garden in Trevaunance Cove, St Agnes. She built the studio herself on the footprint of a dilapidated old potting shed, transforming its purpose from potting to pottery. Out of the window next to her wheel the engine house and chimney stack of Wheal Friendly are visible on the other side of the steep valley; a form that she references in her chimney vases. A few hundred meters down the lane is Trevaunance Cove and neighbouring Trevellas. On her daily dog walks Gail collects fronds of washed-up seaweed and the sun-dried egg cases of sharks and rays (“mermaid’s purses”) from the beach, leaves and ferns from the trees she walks past on the way there, and these organic elements are used in her saggar pieces.

“Traditionally saggar pots were used in wood-fired kilns to protect the pieces from the combustible materials firing the kiln. You would have put your piece in the clay saggar with a lid on it to protect the glaze that was on the pot. Now you can use the saggar as an alternative firing method by filling it with organic combustible materials where they ignite and leave their marks on the piece.”

Saggar is a technique widely done in a gas-fired kiln, even raku kilns. Gail uses an electric kiln because her studio backs onto a steep wooded hillside in a UNESCO World Heritage Site and Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and it is safer not to have an open-flame fired kiln. It was only around 8 years ago that ceramicists started experimenting with saggar firing in an electric kiln, and because at that point Gail was still in the very early stages of planning her move into pottery she adopted the technique and started experimenting with it early on.

“There’s certain things you can’t put in an electric kiln, like salts and chlorides, because they can affect the electric elements. I can use a little bit of seaweed though. Magnolia leaves, seaweed from the beach, shark egg cases, ferns and bits and pieces like that, I put in there. Then I’ve got some old copper wire that one of the local fishermen who lives a couple of doors down helped strip the cables for me. I wrap that around the pieces, which creates the red accents over the blue.”

The resulting pieces are an artistic act of faith and fate. Pottery is as much science as it is art, with the chemistry of glazes and the mathematics of clay shrinkage and firing profiles, but saggar introduces an uncontrollable element. How materials fall as they combust and the sort of mark that they leave on a glaze is something that cannot be planned for. As Gail opens her kiln after a firing she gets a first glimpse at the result; in this case she is happy with a pattern that is recognisable as a fern leaf on one piece, whilst she’s not so happy with the colours and patterns on another. “That one will probably end up being used in our kitchen!”

“As far as I’m aware, I’m the only person doing this specific saggar firing technique predominantly in an electric kiln in Cornwall.”

For her saggar-fired pieces, Gail has started using porcelain because it is finer and denser, and the result is that the effect is more “high definition.” For the rest of her vases, cups and jugs, she uses the highly regarded St Agnes stoneware clay from the Dobles clay pit.

“Bernard Leach used this exact clay down at Leach Pottery in St Ives. Nathaniel Doble is the third generation who hand mixes the clay in small batches. He’s got his great granddad’s old mill where he mixes all of the clays. He’s sometimes hard to get hold of, but I message him when I need clay and get a reply saying “come in ten minutes or tomorrow morning once I’ve done the cows!” and I head a mile up the road to collect it.”

The Doble clay pit is on a farm at St Agnes Head, between The Beacon and the cliffs. Gail and her husband are serial renovators and Gail knew about Dobles clay before she took up pottery because when they were doing up a barn they were buying sand there to mix with cement and lime to do the pointing. “All of the creamy pointing around stone work around this part of Cornwall is generally Dobles sand” Gail says. When she started throwing in earnest three years ago she used Dobles clay because her husband knew Nathaniel’s Dad and it was her local clay; it just so happens to also be some of the best and highly regarded stoneware clay in the region. Using clay from anywhere else was out of the question, simply because of the tight geographic radius within which Gail collects her materials, and her inspiration.

“I try to pick colours that reference the cove and coast around where I live. I didn’t want to go for the traditional or shiney glazes. I like dark things. So I started looking at all of the colours around the cove. There’s some greens and earthy colours that I absolutely love. And then I’ve created this one, which I’m going to call Trevaunance. Mark at Blue Hills Tin mine still has the rights to collect the tin from Trevellas and Trevaunance, panning it out of the stream – it’s the tin that makes the dark streaks on the beaches here. Some of the ingredients in the glaze are tin, which is in the beach, quartz, which is in the beach, and iron, which is in the beach too, so the ingredients that make the glaze on these stem vases look like a pebble from the beach are the minerals that make up the beach itself.”

Gail had never previously mixed any of her own glazes, taking the most enjoyment from actually throwing her pieces. There is a highly technical and scientific aspect to some parts of the process, but as is so often the case, because it was in service to a desired tangible outcome learning that science was actually enjoyable.

“I’d never mixed any of my own glazes from a recipe. I did a course earlier this year with Linda Bloomfield, who’s written books on it. She’s a potter and chemist with a PhD, and she took it back to layman’s terms. I had to use the periodic table, but because we were doing the practical side of it and I knew that I wanted this sort of granite effect, the theory all made sense.”

“They’re bud vases, or stem vases. I just like the shape. They’re a little bit more tactile and a little nod to all of the eroded pebbles on the beach, really. I like throwing those sorts of shapes.”

Gail’s route into ceramics is somewhat circuitous. Her great granddad and great uncles were all potters in Musselburgh and later in Portobello, Edinburgh, making stoneware, but in spite of this family history of ceramics it was not something that she knew or experienced, and she was prevented from studying it further at school because she had already taken too many creative subjects. Eight years ago she decided to try pottery again and did an adult education course at Truro College, before taking to the wheel in earnest in 2022.

“I bought a second hand wheel that only spun for a right handed person, but I’m left handed. So it was spinning anti-clockwise and I had to learn to do everything the wrong way round. I was throwing to the specific forms that I wanted because I didn’t like having to trim the wrong way around. As I result I now throw as close to the finished pot as possible with minimal trimming. The wheel sat in the shed for about three years whilst the kids were growing up and we finished the house. I now have a new left-handed wheel.”

In recent years Gail has become a founding member of Cornwall Potters Collective, formed by a group of likeminded ceramicists to share knowledge, experience and kiln space and to exhibit as a group.

“So many of us have studios in the middle of nowhere or that are difficult to access, so we club together to rent exhibition space as a collective.”

She is now an associate member of Penwith Gallery, St Ives and her wall hangings and vases are exhibited in several galleries around the county, from Padstow to Penzance. Gail sells her cups and vases directly through her mailing list and website, releasing collections periodically rather than having her works permanently available. She also works directly with interior designers to create pieces specifically for interior schemes, a part of her practice that she really enjoys as it connects her interest and background in interiors and architecture to her creative ceramics practice. As for what the future holds:

“I’ve got an idea for a couple of sculptures that I’d like to do. It’s just getting the time to start them! But I’d like to get them done for an exhibition that’ll be coming up towards the end of the year.”

You can view Gail’s ceramics on her website and Instagram, or enjoy them in person at various galleries around Cornwall.