This is a three day course with internationally recognised and celebrated professional potter Anna Lambert. Learn how to develop designs for simple slab built ceramic platters and tiles. You will discover ways to build complex and layered surfaces with tonal and coloured slips, using combinations of surface pattern techniques.

You'll start with the rolling of slabs for plates and test pieces. We will then spend time around Coombe Farm, drawing and gathering ideas for the workshop.

A practical hands on approach to making glazes and exploiting a myriad of special effects in glazes from Lava to Oil Spot, expertly tutored by the author of numerous books on Glazing - Linda Bloomfield.

During the course you will spend the first day making glaze tests, then the next day learning about glaze chemistry and analysing the results.

This course is ideally suited to anyone that has some experience of glazing pots and wants to deepen their understanding and do some experimentation. 

We are delighted that master potter Tim Andrews joins us again in 2024. Tim is known internationally for his distinctive raku pottery and for his book ‘Raku‘* a comprehensive overview of raku, covering the history, clay types and firing of raku, as well as the glazes, techniques and reduction processes. Tim makes individual work, black and white with linear decoration, or burnished muted coloured slips. The pieces are usually thrown, although some work is hand-built.

We are thrilled to be adding a new pottery course at Coombe in 2021 with the hugely talented potter Adam Frew. We have long admired the work of Adam who makes clean, simple forms on wheel. Based in rural Northern Ireland Adam works in porcelain, creating thrown functional and large one-off pots

In this immersive weekend pottery course you will work in stoneware and focus on simple forms thrown on the wheel or made from slabs, moulds and coils. You’ll then spend time decorating using coloured slips and drawn lines. This is an ideal course if you want to slow down and pay attention to the forms you are making, and to be introduced to, or develop, your skills in applying and experimenting with coloured slips and the use of oxides.

I’m thrilled to announce Rachel Wood as a new tutor for 2025. This course aims to refresh, revitalise and deepen your connection with the hand building techniques of pinching and coiling. Using an experimental approach, you will be able to gain confidence, develop competent skills and befriend your clay.

You will learn and apply surface decoration and mark making techniques to add vitality and life to your work, so that the natural qualities of the clay, and the experience of being at Coombe come shining through.

We are delighted to be welcoming back to Coombe the utterly brilliant and talented Sabine Nemet. Sabine will be teaching a five day throwing course, focusing on the shapes and forms she makes and is known for.

We created this new course in 2023 offering tutored sessions in both outdoor swimming and pottery led by hugely talented and experienced potters Laurel Keeley and Jodie Crook Giles and Outdoor Swimming Society Director Kari Furre. It was a huge success so its back for 2024.

This is an immersive five day intensive pottery residential with the internationally recognised potter Anna Lambert. Anna builds her work from a white earthenware mixed clay, using a variety of handbuilding techniques.

An intermediate pottery throwing course focusing on all the elements of making a teapot and cups. Tim has taught around the world for over thirty years - workshops, lecturing, FE & HE.

He trained originally with David Leach and at Dartington. Tim exhibits internationally - most recently in Japan, China and Australia.

Dylan Bowen. Making and decorating dynamic slip decorated earthenware - During this course Dylan will demonstrate and teach various techniques based on his own work.