Millie Stewart is an artist currently working in the small village of Moretonhampstead, in the heart of Dartmoor National Park in Devon, where she is apprenticing with wood-fired potter Nic Collins. Here, both the kilns and even the wheel operate without modern technology, yet they still produce functional, everyday ware. It is this way of working that fosters a deeper, hard-earned connection to the objects created.

 

Wood firing is slow, labour-intensive, and above all, unpredictable. It is physically demanding, and without a bisque firing, the clay moves directly from earth to wheel to kiln. Despite its challenges, the process feels more natural.

 

In this exhibition, the pots are presented not as individual pieces but as tall towers, arranged just as they were in the kiln, emerging together from the ashes. In their surfaces you can see soluble salts crystallising, flashes of the flame across their sides and ash fused onto their forms. These marks show a snapshot of a world within the walls of a kiln, in temperatures that we could not survive. These towers rise like totems that belong to both past and present, revealing the beauty of wood firing, its imperfections, its uncertainties, and the profound, slowly disappearing connection it creates with us, our materials and our ancestral ways of making.