I Made it at Market
I Made it at Market on the BBC
Dom Chinea nearly took my eyebrows off after drinking a cup of tea in my kitchen.
Surreal? Yes. True? Also yes.
It was a very wet day in January and I'd spent the past 3 days solid tidying and cleaning. Maybe I should have done it before but it had been a very busy festive time.
In fact, it had been a very busy year – and I was about to have a catch up about business and art having appeared on the tellybox programme “Make it at Market” back in 2023 where I was making joyful ceramic birds.
Make it at Market Series 1
It was filmed only 6 months after I got my hands on clay for the first time, and so much has happened since then.
I’m absolutely chuffed to little mintballs that the BBC decided they wanted to do some follow-ups with people who had been on the show. Not least because I was now one of them! What an honour to be part of the catch-up story!
So that’s why presenter Dom Chinea (of Repair Shop and Make it at Market fame) was in my kitchen.
It was wonderful catching up with him since it had been 3 years (and counting) since we were introduced in the first series of Make it at Market when I was making my joyful little birds. Now he’d come to see what I was up to in 2026.
The 3 Flippy Flappies. The one on the right is the original, the one in the middle is the cast bronze and the one on the left was a reproduction I created for filming.We had some serious conversations and fun with clay, and I had to hang on to my eyebrows as Dom got hold of the torch when it came time to add a patina onto Flippy Flappy - my bronze Puffin sculpture
Who is, incidentally, very pleased with his 15 minutes of fame and can frequently be seen waving at the camera.
There’s 20 makers who have had the catch-up and the programme “I Made it at Market” will be run over 2 weeks. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002tspd/episodes/guide
Special thanks go to Bronzecast, who agreed to let me capture some of the huge amount of skilled work involved in turning a clay piece into a bronze sculpture. If anyone is looking for an artist-led foundry then I can highly recommend them.
