Meet the English artisans turning nature into art in Cornwall

Reaching out from the southwest corner of England, Cornwall is a county steeped in natural beauty — shimmering water laps at the sheltered coves of its shoreline, while evening mist weaves between the stone hedges and spongy tussocks of the moors inland. Yet, to many residents of Cornwall, nature isn’t only a landscape but a livelihood. Cobbled lanes are home to workshops and studios where wood, sea glass and clay are turned, polished and shaped into craftworks that reflect the land from which they were born. The Cornish people have been crafting for thousands of years, and these contemporary artisans are keeping that tradition alive.

The woodturner

Clouds scud across the sky as I drive up onto Bodmin Moor, leaving the coastal holiday traffic behind. Stark and barren, pocked by heath, hawthorn, gorse and rocky tors, this spine of granite feels a long way from the beaches most people associate with the UK’s southernmost county. I’ve lived in Cornwall my whole life and I still get lost up here, muddled by the high hedges and narrow lanes. It takes several wrong turns before I find the rutted track leading to the workshop of the Cornish Woodsmith — aka Dominic Pearce.

I find Dom behind his vintage lathe, knee-deep in wood shavings. Trained as a carpenter and timber framer, he now specialises in the ancient craft of woodturning, fashioning bowls, spoons, cups, stools and pots from wild green wood, which is used straight from the tree rather than dried like most timber. He sources the wood himself, from storm-blown trees and coppiced woodlands.

“Green wood is a different material to seasoned wood. It has a life and energy of its own,” Dom says. His workshop is lined with the tools of the turner’s trade: chisels, gouges, spokeshaves, grinders, a rusty bandsaw. In one corner stands a stack of giant speakers; in another, his grandfather’s Windsor chair and a vintage motorbike coated in sawdust.

Dom’s trademark are his turned bowls. Practical and elegant, they’re recognisable for their coat of pale blue milk paint, which he mixes himself. Functional items are his mainstay, but more recently he’s experimented with artistic pieces: translucent lampshades, bowls with twisted copper handles, larger vessels sculpted from a single trunk. Like all of Dom’s pieces, their handmade quality is what makes them beautiful. Often, his pieces twist and warp as the wood dries. “For me, that’s the joy of wild wood,” Dom says, as streams of shavings fly past his face and settle in his badger-black hair. “Turning releases stresses inside the wood that formed when the tree was alive. So I can turn them all the same way, but as they dry, they change. I suppose you could say I’m helping the tree tell its story.”

The basketmaker

Over on the south coast, on the edge of the Lizard — the wild, craggy peninsula notorious for its secluded beaches and shipwrecks — Angela Firth is patrolling her willow beds. “We’ve had trouble with deer this year,” she says. “They nibble on my young willow shoots, but they’re so pretty I find it hard to stay cross with them.”

Angela grows more than 30 species of willow in the field below her farmhouse. Their names read like characters in a Harry Potter novel — Wizender, Flanders Red, Brittany Blue, Dicky Meadows, Petite Grisette — but for basketmakers like her, each has its own quality that makes it worth growing. Some Angela plants for their colour, others for their flexibility or their bark. “It’s amazing stuff, willow,” she says as she cuts a shoot using a pocket knife and deftly denudes it of its bark, revealing the milk-white stem beneath.

“I’m a basket nerd,” Angela explains. “Before we had all this horrible plastic, willow was the material of choice for so many things. Not just baskets, but hampers, trays, boxes, bags, even coffins. And in Cornwall, of course, it was used to make crab and lobster pots. I’m not a fisherman myself, but I’m told the willow ones work very well.”

In her Bojorrow Baskets workshop, sheaves of willow are arranged in bays: a rainbow of natural tints, from lime green and straw yellow to tangerine orange, terracotta red and chestnut brown. On the walls, Angela’s bags and baskets hang like works in a gallery, each one woven by hand. Her designs are based on traditional patterns, but there are also more unusual creations, like her Cornish croust (lunch) boxes and tulip baskets, which she interweaves with driftwood, seaweed and foraged shells.

“For me, it’s like meditation,” Angela says, as she begins work on a new basket. “It’s completely absorbing. Some days, I lose track of time and I realise I’m still out here at 10 o’clock at night. But I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

The blacksmith

Twenty miles west of Dom’s workshop, near the village of Trispen is Nico Kenna’s place of work: Trevella Farm Forge. It’s easy to find, I just follow the clangs. Behind a whitewashed farmhouse covered in climbing roses stands a rickety tin-roofed barn where Nico spends his days behind the glowing embers of a coal-fired forge.

Lean and lithe, rather than brawny, and with shock of spiky hair and toothy grin, Nico doesn’t fit the clichéd image of a blacksmith. Blacksmithing is more about technique than brute strength, he tells me. “The secret is controlling temperature,” Nico explains, stirring the coals and eyeing the flames carefully. “People don’t realise, but it’s easy to burn steel, and it can happen quickly. You want it just the right temperature. Too cold, and it’s hard to work. Too hot, and the piece might break.”

Using a pair of hefty tongs, Nico extracts two lengths of metal from the coals: they’re luminous white, shifting through yellows, oranges and reds as they cool. He places them on his anvil, raises his hammer and strikes, sending sparks across the workshop. Twenty blows later, and the pieces are seamlessly joined. This is a technique known as a fire weld, Nico says, used for thousands of years to join metal. “Steel goes black when it cools,” he says, pointing to the obsidian-coloured metal. “That’s why we’re called blacksmiths.”

Once, every Cornish village would’ve had its own blacksmith, making the metal items essential for everyday life, from edge tools to gates. Nico is part of a generation of young smiths reviving this venerable craft, and he’s passionate about preserving these skills. He’s a founding member of the Cornish Blacksmith’s Collective, a group of around 20 metalworkers who get together to share skills and socialise. Nico also runs workshops that teach basic smithing techniques. 

“The thing I love about being a blacksmith is I’m making items that will last long after I’m gone,” Nico says. “I always say, if you’ve got a problem with something I’ve made, get your grandkids to talk to my grandkids.”

I leave Nico to his work and head up the farm track, listening to the buzz of honeybees in the hedgerows and the grumble of a tractor in a nearby field. Behind me, I hear the clang of steel on steel strike up again.

The jeweller

Every morning, Laura Polley walks from her house in Falmouth to the beach. She goes early; usually, dog walkers and wild swimmers are her only company. But often Laura doesn’t even notice them, because rather than looking out to sea, her focus is on the sand under her feet. She’s not here for the views. She’s searching for treasure: sea glass.

“Red is rarest,” she says, her eyes primed for incongruous colours among the sand grains. “You find loads of green, brown and white, sometimes blue. Pinks and reds are the holy grail.” I’ve joined Laura on her hunt, and within five minutes my palm is already full of sea glass — including two shards of crimson that have Laura beaming with pleasure. “Well, you can definitely come again,” she says.

Sea glass turns up on many Cornish beaches, but it’s most common in this port town, which, from 1689 to 1851, was home to the Falmouth Packet Service, a shipping network that carried goods and communications to the far corners of the British Empire. The sailors mostly just chucked their used bottles overboard; over time, the waves have ground them down into a myriad of tiny, technicolour pebbles. Blue glass was used for medicine bottles and pink for perfume bottles. Red was often used in maritime signal lanterns. Occasionally, Laura finds yellow, from prewar tableware tinted with uranium, a practice that was curtailed during the Cold War before falling out of favour. “It’s the Victorian version of microplastics,” she says. “Only a lot prettier.”

Back in her Falmouth studio, tucked away behind a craft shop uphill from the beach, Laura turns these multicoloured shards into jewellery, setting them in silver and fashioning them into rings, pendants, brooches and necklaces. Sometimes, people bring their own finds to her to create one-off pieces, especially wedding rings. With her own jewellery, Laura includes a hand-drawn map to show where the sea glass was gathered. “People love that provenance,” she says. “It’s like carrying a bit of Cornwall with you every day.”

The boardmaker

The first thing I notice about James Otter is that he isn’t wearing any shoes. With his soft-spoken voice, chunky glasses and curly hair tucked under a cap, he seems more like a yoga instructor than a cutting-edge craftsman. But within Cornwall’s surfing community, James is a legend: one of only a handful of UK makers still producing wooden surfboards.

“Originally, before foam boards, all surfboards were made of wood,” James explains when I visit him at his workshop on a hill above Porthtowan Beach, one of a string of surfing spots along Cornwall’s craggy north coast, an area dotted with former mining valleys and derelict engine houses. “Sadly, boards today are disposable items. When they get dinged, they’re replaced. Most end up in landfill. I’m trying to kick back against that throwaway mentality.”

James fell in love with surfing, and Cornwall, on childhood holidays and set up his business, Otter Surfboards, in 2010. A furniture maker by training, James already had most of the skills he needed, but it’s taken him over a decade to perfect the art. “Wood is an amazing material for surfboards,” he says. “It’s sustainable, durable, flexible and — when you make it the way we do — it’s also incredibly light.”

James shows me around his workshop, where students come to craft their own boards. Workbenches are squeezed in alongside racks of Japanese saws, hand planes and sanding blocks. A couple of finished boards await collection, along with a prototype design for a standup paddleboard.

Crafted from poplar and red cedar formed around a hollow core, then glass coated for durability, each of James’s boards pushes the design forward. Many people who attend his five-day courses never surf the boards they make. Instead, they end up as statement coffee tables or hang on walls like artworks. But they’re made to be ridden, James says. “Riding a wooden board is totally different to a foam board. It glides better and has this sense of flow. Once you’ve surfed one, nothing feels quite the same.”

The potter

“I love making things people use every day,” says Emily Tapp, as she thwacks a lump of clay onto her potter’s wheel. “That’s what gets me into work.” With a whirr, the wheel starts up. Emily wets her hands and places them onto the clay, using her palms and fingers to guide its form. A cone emerges, tapered from top to bottom. Her thumbs and fingers hollow the interior. Three minutes later, she holds up a finished mug, to which she adds an ear-shaped curl of clay as a handle. On the shelves behind her, others wait to be glazed and fired. “These are my most popular pieces, so I make tons,” Emily says. “It’s like sense memory for my hands now. I could make them in my sleep.”

Pottery has been made in Cornwall since at least Neolithic times. In the 18th century, the clay pits around St Austell were the world’s main supplier of kaolin, otherwise known as china clay. Although most are now abandoned, the pyramid-shaped spoil heaps they left behind still loom around town.

As is the case with many of Cornwall’s potters, Emily’s work is inspired by the landscape. Her speckled, swirling glazes evoke Cornwall’s mineral tints and textures: sky and sea, granite and sand, the play of light on water. Although delicate, there’s something gritty about her pieces — an echo of the rocky bones that lie under Cornwall’s skin.

Emily’s studio, EOT Ceramics, is based on Argal Farm, a creative collective overlooking green fields and the distant village of Mabe. Setting up the new space has been her main focus for the past year, she says, but soon she’ll be attending a glaze-crafting and brick-making course at Brickfield, a community brickworks set in one of St Austell’s abandoned clay pits and run by Cornish ceramicist Rosanna Martin.

“As a craftsperson, it’s important to keep experimenting,” Emily says. “I need to give myself permission to play.” Turning back to her wheel, Emily plonks down another lump of clay. Experimentation will have to wait. For now, there are mugs to be made.