It was pouring when I reached Longport. I attempted to avoid the puddles in my leaky shoes. The Price and Kensington tea-pot factory looked inviting beside the canal, as the rain sheeted into the water. Articulated lorries sped alongside me on their way to the A500 sending up architectural wings of spray with their wheels. A burglar alarm howled on a now deserted potbank – perhaps the wind had set it off.

‘Shall we go for breakfast at Tunstall Market?’ my friend Pam suggested. ‘Good idea!’ I agreed. We settled in at the Market Grill. Behind us, a Salvation Army officer was collecting funds, dressed in full uniform and hat. At the counter a beautiful woman with a beehive hair-do was having a cup of tea. She wore a nylon apron. Maybe she worked on one of the stalls. The market was busy, and the café was thronged with young and old. Beside us an elegant matron with platinum hair and a black fur coat grasped a mug of tea with red leather gloved hands.  Her scarlet snakeskin handbag lay on the adjoining table. Pam and I decided we would have the Full English – eggs, bacon, sausages, beans, tomatoes and toast.

‘Worked in a potbank, a factory or other noisy environment?’ enquired two young men at the market entrance, as I got up to look around. They were touting for business for their deafness tests. They asked twice before I understood the question.

When I returned, two locals had joined us at our table. One of them was wearing respiratory prongs in her nose. I wondered if she had emphysema. It is a hazard of a life spent in the potteries, but I felt abashed to ask. ‘Come up from London, duck?’ the chattier of the two enquired. ‘Have you just finished University?’

‘Well there’s a compliment for you!’ laughed Pam. ‘I would call that a compliment!’ she repeated, so they understood they’d got it a little wrong. Internally I felt the prong woman probably needed her sight tested. She chatted unguardedly about her friends and relatives. ‘My brother has a lovely girlfriend. He met her on the internet. She comes from Macclesfield.’ When we announced it was time to get the bus to Hanley, their faces fell. ‘It was lovely to meet you.’ I said, truthfully.

Crowds queued in the rain to get into the Potteries Museum. Over the past few days 28,000 people have been through its doors, to see the recently discovered Anglo-Saxon treasure, a haul of gold of astonishing beauty,  known as the ‘Staffordshire Hoard’. I skipped the queues, as I was there to see Geoffrey Snow, Treasurer of the Friends of the Museum. He is typical of Stoke people in a different way. Beautifully dressed, patient, intelligent and generous, he puts a lot of effort in to charitable work for the local community. He gave me several hours of his time and expertise, causing him to miss lunch. All morning he’d been hard at work on the Gift Aid desk. If the Staffordshire Hoard is to stay in Stoke – and all the locals are committed to it doing so – the Museum must raise three million pounds. Yesterday they achieved a significant target –  the first million.

When our meeting was over, we went back to the Gift Aid desk. ‘Are you all right?’ Geoffrey asked his colleague. ‘No, I am not’ she said. ‘I am hungry, and I haven’t had a break since first thing this morning’.

Geoffrey wasn’t going to get anything to eat.

‘Show us what to do, and we’ll collect the funds’ I suggested. He did, and Pam and I took our turn collecting donations to keep the Staffordshire Hoard. The generosity of the locals was mind-boggling. From pounds to pence, almost everyone seemed to have something to give. Who wouldn’t value a community like that?

I often explain to students that their work is likely to be most effective if the means of expression are constrained. Strip away the excess, I advise them, and get to the heart of what you are trying to communicate. In contemporary art people might describe this as ‘minimalism’.  ‘Minimal’ doesn’t mean there isn’t much to the idea. The reverse is probably true. The act of editing generally enriches what you are doing, and makes the visual experience more concentrated.

I wanted to demonstrate this idea practically for a book I was working on. I decided to make something with ceramic tableware. I’d been lukewarm about the use of pottery in mosaic. Maybe I even had the odd outburst of anti-pottery evangelism. Mosaic made from tableware so often looks confusing, excessive and frighteningly sharp. There are varied patterns, colours, surfaces, textures and qualities of reflectivity – so many differences that the work becomes hard to read. Chaos threatens to overwhelm expression. And when mosaics made with pottery are easy to read, it is often because they conform to a well-known model  – breaking up a plate and sticking it together again, for example.  I can see the fun in doing it, but I’m not entirely convinced of the appeal of the finished product for anyone other than the maker. Of course you might argue – some do – that chaos is at the vanguard of delight. Exposure to the hitherto jarring allows us gradually to enter a new enlightened state of pleasurable coherence. The incomprehensible becomes beautiful  – like Schoenberg and twelve-tone technique. I don’t know how many Schoenbergs there are amongst us pottery-smashers, but if you are one, I apologise for my prejudice.

So a dislike of tableware in mosaic was the starting point for my experiments. I issued myself with a challenge – show people how to create something that used ceramic tableware and retained visual coherence. I wasn’t really certain it could be done.

My first problem was colour. If I wanted to employ a variety of randomly collected material – things students and friends had given me to use over the years – what would unify them? The answer seemed to lie in flipping the plates and using the backs of them. Plates may have glazes and decoration on their face, but reverse them, and they are generally white. The printed material on the back of the plates – what I thought of at the time as ‘marks’ and would now call ‘backstamps’ – was interesting, and a challenge to combine effectively. How could I get these to read – to become the content of the work? The answer, as I suggested at the opening of this blog, lay in constraint. Use minimal means.

I will expand on this theme tomorrow. In the meantime here is one roundel from the finished work in the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, from the mecca of ceramic, Stoke-on-Trent.