I’m inspired by traditional architectural styles. I’ve had a lot of hands-on experience with natural building materials, which has influenced my pots. When I was 19, in 1962, I came into a small inheritance and bought a dilapidated cottage with a coach-house and stables in Wales (for just £1,200 – things were very different then). I set up a pottery – though I was far too young, really – and restored all the buildings in a vernacular style, using reclaimed materials. Later, I spent about 15 years away from pottery, busy practising rural self-sufficiency: growing most of our food, rearing animals, and so on. It all had an effect on my work. Today, I still want to make things with a certain naturalness to them.
I’m a very nervous buyer at auctions but over the decades I’ve built up a large collection of small historic objects, mostly from North America – though some are from Italy and Egypt. There are several hundred pieces in total, including stone artefacts such as arrowheads – most are in drawers in collector’s cabinets.