Maham Anjum, Potter
MAHAM ANJUM
East Barnet, north London
Before ceramics became such an integral part of the urban dining experience, Maham would fire clay in her parents’ barbecue to make money while studying at Central Saint Martins. Now, the potter throws plates and bowls in a “glorified shed” in north London for the likes of Atul Kocchar, Vivek Singh, Asma Khan, Vineet Bhatia, and restaurants Kolamba and Hoppers. Inspired by the roadside potters of her home in Pakistan, Maham’s wares focus on functionality and the ceramic process – plus, the unpredictability of working with clay that leads to ideas. This desire to produce pieces simply is a direct result of a craft revival project she developed in Sri Lanka, India and Ethiopia, working with local women artisans.
“I grew up in Karachi, Pakistan, and was fortunate because my dad was an airline pilot, so from a very young age we were travelling a lot. Everywhere I went – Kenya, Sri Lanka – I was completely attracted to these handmade, artisanal pots. I always wanted to do something that was functional, I liked painting and making things. I went to a convent school and had a very inspirational art teacher; there wasn’t a lot of clay to work with, but there was wood and things like plasticine. When I moved to England, I went to Central Saint Martins and studied ceramics. When I didn’t have a kiln, I used to fire things in my parent’s barbecue; one time, I made these clay beads for necklaces to make some money. When I graduated, I started to work with Queensberry Hunt, who have done some of the most iconic designs of the last century and this century. David [Queensberry] and Martin [Hunt] became my mentors.
I’m very interested in the ceramic process and the different techniques that ceramics encompass. We’re very fortunate in the UK to have such a huge variety of clay bodies to work with, and I like to investigate them. I will, of course, look at certain techniques I have seen in the V&A or somewhere on my travels, and I try to see how I can contextualise this to how people are eating or how food is served at the moment. When I’ve worked with terracotta, I started off with very bright colours. For Jamie [Oliver] at Home and Vivek Singh, there was a time when I thought, ‘let’s look at the material itself, we’ve done the colour now, so what else can this material offer?’ I then started to apply lots of different techniques, like terra sigillata, where you use the clay body itself, and you can create different colours with that.
There was this shift in the last 10 years where chefs and restaurants were wanting handmade pieces. Historically, the chef and potter have always worked in tandem because the chef would say to the potter, ‘I can’t cook my beans properly, can you narrow the neck of the pot?’ We’re doing this in the 21st-century-style. I started to work with chefs, like Vivek, and I realised there was this need for handmade ceramics in the UK. I started to throw pieces in my very, very tiny workshops and the demand increased. Now, I hand-make things in my workshop for certain projects, but I also work with industry because I’ve been trained to do both.
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There are days when you open the kiln and say, ‘what was I thinking?’, then there are days when you think, ‘life isn’t so bad.’ It’s amazing how it can change your mood.”
Maham Anjum
My workshop is in East Barnet, north London. It’s like a shack, a glorified shed, with a garden outside. I’ve got a potter’s wheel, a jigger jolly, some shapes that I can turn on my jigger jolly, I’ve got kilns, a slab roller, a lathe, and then we’ve got a little space that’s like an archive of all the projects we’ve done and things I’m developing. There are lots and lots of shelves, too – there’s very little space when we’re busy.
Most of the time I make all of my samples and models myself, even if I’m working with industry, whether they’re made on a wheel or made on a lathe (which I inherited from Queensberry). You want to control the process all the time, but there is this process – and I don’t know if I should use the word ‘organic’ – that happens in the kiln. If you’re using a reactive glaze, it might behave differently on a bowl, it might behave differently on a cup or plate. It also depends where it’s placed in the kiln, whether it’s on the bottom shelf or the top shelf. Sometimes the unpredictability is very interesting because things happen in the kiln and you’re like, ‘how did I do that?’, and then you can’t do it again. I’ve got a whole side of a shelf full of those unpredictables, which say, ‘not sure how I did it’. That is the fun… Sometimes you don’t know how things happen, but they do happen.
I enjoy the simplicity of working on the wheel very much, and I like to explore ceramic techniques but then make shapes that are useable and not too fussy. I’m able to do that when I’m working on the wheel quite easily because, for example, by just turning my fingers I can create a curve on the rim. With Vivek, he might say he’s got an idea for these dumplings that he’s going to cook in the kitchen but wants that process to continue at the table, so they’ll be specific things that I would design for that. Or, when I worked with Lee Westcott, he had some particular dishes that he wanted on green backgrounds, which is not an easy colour, so we did lots of different variations for that. Sometimes chefs come up with a specific idea, but it’s also important that when you have an idea it can be produced in a simple way. I don’t think things should be too fussy because you want to be able to control them. In my workshop, we can control things, but if it’s large quantities it’s not workable. So with something that’s so difficult to make, and has so many components, we find the middle ground.
With retail, a lot of the time it’s dependent on trends, dependent on the Pantone colour or the colour of the season, which may not always go with the food we’re eating and the way we eat. More and more, the way we eat is influenced by the restaurants that we eat at and what we’re reading in magazines, seeing on social media and the plating of that, and people want to emulate this in their home. When you’re working with a chef, it’s very much to do with their concept, their idea, their sensibility and yours put together. The proportions are very different to how food is served in restaurants and how food is served at home, so, of course, the sizing is different. Now, the kind of work we have been undertaking to do with retail is very much based on the hospitality scene and influenced by the hospitality model.
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When you’re working with a chef, it’s very much to do with their concept, their idea, their sensibility and yours put together
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I’m really nothing without the incredible chefs I work with because we work together. I have always liked working with Jamie [Oliver] and his team, as well as Asma Khan from Darjeeling Express, who I met through Twitter, and people like Vineet Bhatia because we were thinking inside out. With the Coya restaurants, we were breaking the rules and making them again, which you can only do if you’re working with a passionate chef. I find that very exciting. I’m working with a Spanish chef at the moment and we’re trying to create something outside of the box, which has kept me going during these coronavirus times. It keeps me up at night, which I like.
When I was doing my MA at Central Saint Martins, I was lucky that David became my supervisor. We started a project in Sri Lanka and the idea was to revive handmade crafts in developing countries. I started to work with potters in Sri Lanka, trying to understand how they were working, where the decline in their market was, why these people were not getting enough work. We thought, ‘hold on, there’s a place for these handmade products in the UK’. I worked with a group of women potters and we looked at what they were making, we rescaled certain things (with their permission, of course) to fit the needs of the market in Europe. The kilns that they used would not go to the high firing temperatures and glazed pottery doesn’t really exist in Sri Lanka, so we took the craft of the potters, working in their village, in their workshops, working around their lifestyle and structure, and then it was taken to a factory where it was fired and glazed to high temperatures, which is what we needed because we use dishwashers, so the pots have to be impervious and have longevity. It was a drop in the ocean compared to many other projects helping artisans, but we were able to help these women potters – one sent her daughter to university, one got a sewing machine to sew clothes for the local school, one brought a piece of land to grow fruit.
I still get excited about ceramics. There are some days when you open the kiln and say, ‘oh, what was I thinking?’, and then there are days when you think, ‘life isn’t so bad.’ It’s amazing how it can change your mood.”
For more designs, visit mahamanjum.co.uk
Photography: Ani Sarpe (portrait)
@mahamx
