by Janine Hill

PATRICK Swayze and Demi Moore are nowhere to be found. In fact, The Pottery Studio at Nambour is a place where people are heading to lose themselves.

Studio manager Aelish Healy said playing in clay was not just a creative pursuit but a chance to escape from “real life” for a while.

“Some people want to achieve a piece,” Aelish said. 

“It’s a huge investment for people to come and switch off and not really think about things that are going on in normal life.

“Once you’re handling the clay, you have to focus in such a way that you can find yourself switching off from everything else.”

The Pottery Studio offers one-off classes and short courses for people who want to try or learn how to throw pottery on a wheel or hand-build pieces in clay.

“Most of our classes are on the weekends. People come in for two hours and make a piece, and come back and glaze it, and then we do four and six week clay courses for people who want to learn a little bit more,” Aelish said.

“We get a lot of beginners, people that have never tried pottery or the last time they did it was when they were three years old.

“We get people in their 80s and 90s. People bring their mums and grandmas. A lot of husbands get dragged along.”

Aelish said people expecting wheel throwing to be just like the scene from the movie, Ghost, were often surprised at how messy it was in real life. 

Others had to adapt to the unfamiliar feeling of being a novice at something.

“We have people that make something a little big and wonky and they don’t care and there are other people where everything has to be perfect,” she said.

“It’s interesting having these people together and how they work their clay together.”