About the studio
A small studio, a kiln, and a lot of other people's memories passing carefully through it.
How this started
Clay Contour began with earrings, as these things often do. A kitchen table, a pasta roller used for entirely the wrong purpose, and a growing pile of experiments in soft sage and blush.
The memorial work came later, and by accident. Someone asked whether a lock of their horse's tail could be worked into a piece. It could. What we did not expect was how much that piece would come to mean — or how many people would ask for the same thing afterwards.
What we make
Two things, really. Lightweight clay jewellery meant to be worn every day, and memorial pottery made with hair or ashes from an animal or person someone loved.
They sound unrelated. They are not. Both come down to making something by hand that someone keeps for a long time.
How we work
Everything is made individually. Nothing is cast, nothing is outsourced, and nothing is made in a batch of five hundred somewhere else.
For memorial commissions that matters more than usual. Your horse's hair is not interchangeable with anyone else's. It is logged when it arrives, kept labelled and separate, and whatever is left comes home with the finished piece along with a note of exactly what was used.
Why one of a kind means it
Horsehair pottery is finished by laying hair onto clay that has just come out of the kiln at around 1000°F. It carbonises on contact and burns a dark, smoke-like line permanently into the surface.
That mark cannot be planned, repeated or recreated — not by us, not by anyone. Two pieces made from the same horse's tail on the same afternoon will look different. That unpredictability is the whole point of it.
Getting in touch
Enquiries are answered personally, usually within two business days. If you are considering a memorial piece and are not sure where to start, just say so — it is a conversation we have often, and there is no wrong way to begin it.