|
|
I have been working with ceramics for almost thirty years. My earliest memory of appreciating ceramics was in primary school, which then continued into pottery classes in secondary school. I have always had a passion for the arts and enjoyed anything that inspired my creativity. My love for ceramics really started when I threw my first pot, my teacher was impressed at my natural ability. After I finished school, I started attending a weekend pottery course and I quickly became hooked. Soon after, Carol Rogers Ceramics was born in 1994.
I setup my studio in a shed at home and continued to throw pots for fun. I began selling a few at local craft fairs, my pots would sell well, and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.
As my business began to grow I started to employ staff to help me. We were a great team, we had such good fun but worked hard as well. Amos, my crazy chocolate Labrador, was our workshop companion. He would regularly disappear out of the hatch of my second floor workshop (yes, he would jump from second floor), run off around the nearby trout fishery and return without us even knowing he'd been gone, shortly followed by an angry fisherman shouting that a brown dog had been in his bait bag and eaten his sandwiches... oops ! Amos regularly got into lots of bother and had a little bit of a reputation for mischief! |
Amos (Chaos) our crazy Workshop Supervisor.
I could have written a book about some of the trouble he got me into. He lived to 16 and cost me a small fortune with his lunatic antics, bless him. |
I setup my studio in a shed at home and continued to throw pots for fun. I began selling a few at local craft fairs, my pots would sell well, and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. I bought supplies from another small local business, they also sold slip cast animals for their customers to fettle at home, the company would then fire them in the kiln and sell them glazed to decorate. I bought a few of the pigs that they produced, one of these pigs was shown at the beginning of the hit film ‘Babe’. The film made my ceramics very popular and as I was living on a farm at the time, I decided to expand on the farm animal theme and my ‘Shelfies’ came to life.
I made a wide array of barnyard animal shelfies, from sheep, to pigs, cows, chickens and horses, to name a few. I started selling in local shops, at the same time attending exhibitions and trade fairs, business really boomed.
It wasn’t long before I was not only selling locally, but nationally and even internationally. As the business grew, my pigs had always been my most popular item, but these had now been surpassed by my horses. It became clear that there was a niche in the market for me to personalise my shelf horses to my customers own horses on request.