About.

Mud Station opened in 2012. When she first moved to Edinburgh Sylwia Kolasinska wanted a small personal studio where she could develop her own practice as a potter, and maybe welcome a couple of students. Occasionally someone would come for a class, or just drop in for a chat and a cup of coffee. Gradually, these irregular meetings caught on, word of mouth started to spread, and the studio got busier, with a wider network of friends and associates. Regular class times were established and people brought their friends. Sylwia’s really good at creating community. Sylwia met Stephen Wood in 2013. His background is in education. He became more involved over time, participating jointly with Sylwia in the day to day running of the studio, and providing lots of coffee and cake. We moved premises – to the shop next door –  as it was becoming clear that we needed more space. 

When we were planning the beginner’s classes, we put a lot of thought into it before we started promoting them. We told ourselves, ‘wouldn’t it be great if six people signed up at the same time’, imagining running one single six-class block then having to wait till another six people took enough interest to justify running another one. We had humility on our side but wildly underestimated the amount of interest the classes would generate, and the amount of fun we would have running them. Now we have three classes per week, and we are booked three months in advance with many people rebooking to develop their pottery and enhance their personal growth. We offer a detailed ongoing curriculum of classes for all levels and abilities.   

Mud Station has become a community hub – a place of teaching and learning, somewhere for people to meet and retreat, connect with others, laugh, enlarge their spirits and test their ideas, somewhere that seems to exist to make life better for everyone, ‘changing the world one pot at a time’ as our friend John Christie says. It’s a place where people discover, sometimes to their amazement, that they can make something beautiful; a place where families come for some special time together doing something different; a place where established craftspeople can come for new ideas or a fresh take on a project, where groups can come to celebrate or delve deeper into shared sources of inspiration.

We are near the centre of Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital city, in a district burgeoning with artists, crafters, friendly inclusive pubs, gorgeous little cafes and bookshops. We are doing our best to contribute to the atmosphere and culture of the place.

Mud Station is now home to our personal studio, the community education classroom, a reference library, and kiln room. We have five wheels now: three Shimpo and two Alsager. The kilns are electric, two from Nabertherm, and the third was found buried in the centre of a stone circle at an undisclosed location near Inverness. We benefit from a pug mill that lurks in the basement like something off an old submarine. There is also a beloved coffee machine which gets far too much use.

Overall we are motivated by a sense that communal art practices are a necessary part of life, not a luxury. Pots are cultural antibodies. Making something yourself, putting some of your life into a piece of clay and transforming it through firing, has a magical, healing resonance that we all need.

Sylwia says - My fascination for ceramics was kindled from the first moment I touched clay, this would have been in 2004. I have always enjoyed working with my hands and have experience of other mediums such as stained glass, but it was clay that truly got under my skin. As there were no courses available to me at that time and I found literature hard to come by, I began by experimenting and exploring what I could do at home.

Clay work inspires me in ways I’ve never had before: wherever I look, I see potential for art and expression, every leaf is a perfect mould for my next sculpture, every piece of tree bark would create a fascinating piece if pressed into clay. My fascination with ceramics constantly evolves, incorporating all the knowledge and experience I’ve gained throughout the years. Over the next few years I explored the limited opportunities in Poland to develop my understanding, skills and techniques by developing a network of local potters and seeking advice and support.

As a self-taught potter I learned by understanding my mistakes. I experimented with a lot of different pottery techniques, hand building, slip casting and throwing. I explored glazing and firing somewhat randomly due to the limitations of the old kiln I installed in my living room. I visited Michal Puszczynski in the summer of 2006 and saw his work fired in a wood fired kiln. I was immediately excited by and oriented towards this firing technique; this experience, firing pieces in a Tongkama kiln, remains a highlight in my life.

For me, the work becomes something that needs to be thought about, studied and understood. I find working with fire enthralling and know this is the way forward for me as a potter. Since then I have been striving to learn about and experience the wood firing process. I have built several Raku kilns, the most recent, built in an old oil drum, works quite well. My work is an area where I feel I encounter original, primordial, pristine matter, the elements of earth and water, fire and air, and the studio becomes an arena of alchemical transformation which I find endlessly inspiring.

Stephen says - I started touching clay when I was a little boy. My father was digging a hole in the garden and I took some of the clay and turned it into a bowl. I put it to dry on the boiler and it gradually cracked and fell apart. It was my first pottery-related disappointment. Later on, I became a bit obsessed with handbuilding, spending ages forming reefs of creatures from my imagination out of the school clay that came in big cold slabs. I remember my surprise when the teacher fired them and the clay went from grey and dull to pink and brittle. I made the eyeballs separately and glued them onto springs that I prised out of school pens then fixed the other end of the springs into holes in the characters’ heads so that their eyes could interactively boing about when you flicked them.

I first sat at a potter’s wheel when I was 17. I was studying something else at the time, but kept being drawn back to the art department, to throw pots.

Later on at university, still officially studying something else, I spent an increasing amount of time in the Art School across the road where the head of ceramics, who apparently liked having a refugee from another discipline, let me throw pots after his full time students had gone home. This was my first encounter with reduction firing – I was enthralled how you could get different results from the same glaze combinations by reducing the amount of oxygen in the kiln. It felt like occult knowledge. 

Once I met Sylwia I started practising in a more systematic way. I spent a long time being a bit rubbish, but – this is the important part – I kind of enjoyed being rubbish, I didn’t give up, I had lots of adrenaline and focus and gradually this uncomfortable period where my aesthetic sense and my skills didn’t hook up became the gateway to being better. It’s important when you’re getting into something new, to recognise discomfort as the way into growth. Every milestone, however small or insignificant, is worth celebrating. It’s important when you’re a beginner to recognise that your own limitations aren’t obstacles but the very threshold of a liberating learning experience. I try to model this and incorporate it into the classes I now facilitate for others.

I’m interested in traditional Japanese forms, and the culture, mythology and archaeology of the far north. Though I don’t reflect too systematically on my influences. I just want to improve constantly and to grow personally and technically. As I develop my practice I notice how learning is an embodied activity and material craft is ‘silent knowledge’, in the sense of being non-linguistic. I find this liberating. Bearing and repeating forms of silent knowledge is essentially healing, especially in our global networked culture that puts so much emphasis on the virtual and the visual, where the mind and the body have become detached and ultimately disconnected. In a wider way I’m interested in the potential of the body as a knowing entity – with all our senses being structured to produce and maintain silent knowledge in the form of vessels made of clay. A clay vessel contains traces of emotion, imagination, intelligence, strength, sensitivity, timing; ways of thinking and touching that can’t really be separated from each other.