Iona Lear's studio in Walthamstow

Iona Lear works on the second floor of a converted carpet warehouse at the eastern end of Blackhorse Lane, where Walthamstow gives over to allotments and the reservoir. The studio is one long room with a north-facing window the length of the back wall. On the morning I visit, in mid-March, the light is grey and steady, the kind that ceramicists like, and Lear is finishing a batch of stoneware bowls she has been throwing in series for the past three weeks.

She does not greet me at the door so much as continue. The wheel is turning. There is a bowl on it, ribbed and rising under her fingers, and she finishes the curve of the lip before she looks up. I think this is true of everyone who works with their hands at this scale: there is a refusal of the social gesture when it would interrupt the work. I’m not offended. I sit at the long table at the front of the room, where she has put out two mugs, and wait.

The kettle on the hob is doing the conversational work in the meantime.

The shape of a series

There are fourteen bowls already finished, ranged along a plank shelf in front of the window. Lear refers to them as a run. She is throwing twenty in total and will keep, she thinks, six or seven. The others will go back into slop and be reclaimed. This sounds, when she says it, less wasteful than economical: a series is how she finds the form, and the finding is what the work is.

“The first one is always the worst,” she says, wiping her hands. “The fifth is too pleased with itself. Somewhere around the ninth I stop trying.”

I look along the shelf. The bowls are, to a casual reader, very alike. Round-bottomed, low-lipped, a soft rim that turns inward by a degree or two. Stoneware, unglazed for now, the colour of damp linen. Looked at for longer — and Lear is silent while I look — the differences are not subtle so much as deliberate. The fourth bowl carries a slight upward push at the lip on one side, where she has caught it with her thumb. The seventh has a base a millimetre deeper than the rest. The tenth, which Lear says she will keep, has a quality I find hard to describe except by saying that it sits.

Iron, ash, breakfast

The glazes are mixed in plastic buckets at the far end of the studio, labelled in chalk. Iron, ash, tenmoku, a celadon she has been adjusting for months. There is a smaller jar of breakfast cereal on the same shelf, which she eats most mornings standing up. I ask about this and she says, factually, that sitting down to eat is something she has stopped doing in the studio because the work is more interesting.

She fires twice a week in an electric kiln, gas being out of the question on this floor. The schedule of a working potter, she tells me, is governed less by inspiration than by drying times. Today’s bowls will be leather-hard by Friday, dry by Tuesday, bisque-fired the following week. The glaze firing is two weeks after that. In the meantime, she throws more bowls.

“It’s not romantic,” she says. “It’s a queue.”

What stays

I leave at lunchtime. Lear walks me to the lift and we shake hands at the gate. On the bus back to Liverpool Street I find I am still seeing the fourteen bowls on the plank: the small variations, the run of a hand learning what it was already trying to do. There is a kind of authority in that kind of looking that has nothing to do with finished work. The bowls themselves will turn up, eventually, in someone’s kitchen. The morning will not.