Earthworks: No Ordinary Pottery

Step through and the place is at work: David at the wheel throwing custom wine goblets, the clay opening under his hands with the ease of someone who has done this for thirty-seven years; Shirley, thirty-eight years at the studio, shaping a sea cat; Pauline, thirty-five years at the studio, expertly cutting out star and moon shapes on lamp fixtures for a hotel commission; at another bench, (add name) painting turtle designs onto small plates; Junie and Deshawn moving between pieces, wiping off imperfections before they reach the kiln, each piece getting the Earthworks name inscribed on its base — a name Goldie once noted had only one flaw: it is very long to write. The light comes in through the trees in shifting, dappled patches across the workbenches. Later in the visit, David moves to a row of bowls, applying the signature swirl directly from the tube. Every piece that leaves here is hand-decorated, what he calls “a good honest creation”: made for the kitchen, the dishwasher, the table with family and friends, and the years that follow.

David, Goldie’s son, left teaching to join Earthworks in July 1989 and has never left. He runs the studio now and also Flower Forest, the botanical gardens a short distance away, and his deep commitment to the island’s natural world shapes much of what Earthworks does within and beyond its walls. Goldie, now in her nineties, still comes in regularly to make pinch pots — the small hand-formed pieces that were the first thing she ever made in clay, and the reason this place exists at all. David calls his mother “the most talented designer I’ve ever worked with.” She had arrived from Canada as a watercolor painter, already obsessed with capturing the landscape: the cerulean sky, the turquoise water, and especially the palm trees, with their “long spindly trunks and feather-duster tops.” On her visits to the pottery villages of Chalky Mount she discovered that a craft with roots going back to the Arawak people, and later to the African slaves who brought their own traditions and kept those forms alive across generations, was quietly dying out. Goldie called her mission to revive it “the cause,” and it took years of resistance, failed kilns, and persistence. The studio she built became Earthworks — quite a feat for someone who had never made a pot before — and Barbados pottery today is thriving: Hamilton’s, Highland Pottery, Motions of Clay, and a number of individual ceramic artists across the island. Their work also runs through Flower Forest, the botanical gardens David runs nearby, where ceramic mural pieces are installed throughout the grounds.

The murals Earthworks has produced around the island — a large sustainability piece off the ABC Highway near Warrens, a Hawksbill turtle conservation mural carrying the Barbados Sea Turtle Project hotline number, and a government commission at Temple Yard in red, gold, and green, with lion heads and Marcus Garvey stars worked into the Earthworks visual language — reflect the same commitments that run through the pottery itself. David’s ambition is for the studio to become the world’s first fully solar-powered pottery. “Nothing beats a try,” he says, which is, it turns out, roughly how Earthworks got started.