WHAT started as a casual lift to a pottery supply shop turned into a life-changing moment for Fermanagh woman Anna McGurn.
A self-taught ceramic artist, her journey from her back shed to the final of Channel 4’s ‘The Great Pottery Throw Down’ has been anything but ordinary.
“It was by accident,” Anna told the ‘Herald, thinking back to the day six or seven years ago when she first stepped into Ulster Ceramics.
“It was something I always wanted to do, and I was working in Clanabogan at the time and they were opening a pottery shop.
“So I drove the girls who were opening the shop up to Ulster Ceramics to get things and I saw everything and I wanted to do it then.”
Determined
Having caught the bug, Anna taught herself in her back shed, progressing to applying to The Great Pottery Throw Down, where she made it to the final.
“It was brilliant, it was life changing, it was positive. I met wonderful people who taught me so much and the group of people I was with were the best, a really lovely bunch,” she said.
Anna, who is from the Boa Island area, took the leap to go full-time in January – only for her workshop to be blown down by a storm at the same time.
Undeterred, she found a new creative home in Kesh, where she now runs workshops and continues her practice full-time.
“I think pottery is so good, everyone can do something with clay,” she said.
“There is so many different things you can do, you can carve with it, you can sculpt, you can throw it on the wheel. I am yet to meet somebody who can’t put their hand to it and produce something.”
“It is that lovely thing of working with your hands and your head all together,” she continued.
“The feedback I get from the workshops is people get into a zone it’s great me time, you leave everything else behind you. You are just stuck in this moment with this clay, clay comes from the ground, it is the most grounding material you can work with.”
Debut exhibit
Now, Anna’s work recently took centre stage at the Strule Arts Centre, where her debut solo exhibition ‘Humans, Being’ captured the complexity of human emotion through striking, figurative sculpture.
“I like to have that connection or story behind my pieces and as I make them I have this narrative going on in my head about what it is about and it forms the piece for me,” Anna explained.
“I wanted each piece to reflect what I was trying to tell with that piece, some of the pieces are quite intricate and others are very stripped down to the bare basics.
“It depended on the story that I had behind it. I am very much into connecting, that people can look at a piece, if someone goes into the exhibition and sees one piece that they feel they can relate to or means something to them then for me that is a success and that is what I wanted.”
Her first major solo exhibition came with its share of nerves – she admits to wondering if she’d be standing alone in the gallery – but the response was overwhelmingly positive.
Grateful and humbled by the support, she was especially touched when several of her fellow ‘Pottery Throw Down’ contestants surprised her by turning up on opening night.
“[The exhibition] has really encouraged me that I am on the path I should be on,” she said.