Rye Pottery

Video – Hand-Painting the Wife of Bath

We’re loving the buzz around the launch of “The Wife of Bath: A Biography” by Oxford Uni Chaucer specialist Professor Marion Turner. The book is published by Princeton University Press & has had incredible reviews. And lots of you will know that we love anything that celebrates & demystifies the many women who have been airbrushed from history.

So to celebrate we filmed our very own Wife of Bath figure being painted so you can see how we bring our own amazing version of this renowned medieval woman to life. We know lots of our collectors love seeing how we actually make and paint things here, so this is a short 1 minute insight into Chaucer’s most famous pilgrim being hand-decorated by one of our talented team – using freehand brushwork. You can see how the colours change after she’s been fired for the second time.

Discover more about the professor’s book by visiting the Princeton Uni website here and if you’d like to see more about the 37 figures in our hand-made Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales Collection do click here.

Arts Film – The making of our Sussex Pigs

An online film about our unusual Sussex Wedding gift, the Sussex Pig has been unveiled by Rye Arts Festival. The 12 minute short is a gentle & thoughtfully constructed piece explaining our pigs’ extraordinary story and revealing exactly how these unusual pottery drinking vessels are made.

Our ceramic Sussex Pigs have been hand-made & hand painted using freehand brushwork since the 1800s, with over 12 hand processes used to create them. Created by arts & culture filmmaker Alisdair Kitchen, the film launched this week as part of Rye Arts Festival’s Digital Fringe.

We’re enormously grateful to Al and the Rye Arts Festival team for choosing us. We really enjoyed working with him and can’t believe he’s made such a strong testament to our amazing team and quite how much time and skill is involved in every single piece of pottery we make.

Do click on the film above to find out about the history of our crazy wedding pigs and how they’re made entirely by hand. And if you’re tempted to have one yourself, you can see the full range by clicking here.