Freyja Lee is charmingly, genuinely modest when it comes to her work. “I’m terrible at talking about it!” she cries, face in hands. But, when she gets on to the topic of poetry, the words come, rapturous and lyrical. “It’s such a big thing for me,” she says, as she jumps nimbly from Mary Oliver to Sappho. She mentions one poem in particular by the ancient Greek: “Her words transported me in an instant. I read them and suddenly I was there – on the dark earth at the feet of the goddesses that she wrote about.”
Dark earth and goddesses seem a good place to start when it comes to Freyja’s work. Her creations feature both in abundance. Using largely slip – a creamy mixture of clay and water mixed, in Freyja’s case, with cobalt and black pigments – and a lustrous glaze made of real gold, she conjures creatures and characters in the mythic mould, painting and drawing them on to teapots, tiles, dishes and jugs. All her ‘canvases’ are handmade by an aunt of Freyja’s husband, a potter by the name of Tilly Young. Tilly, who spent six formative months training in Japan, has been making ceramics for three decades. She now runs Washfield Pottery in northern Devon, which Freyja visits as often as she can (she also juggles life as a mother of two small children).
In fact, it was having children that first got her going with all this – and the maternal spirit takes shape in her figures’ swollen bellies and wide hips, her feverish feminine deities. Four years ago, not long after Freyja first gave birth, her husband, a wagon maker and restorer called Rollo Dunford Wood, was undergoing chemotherapy. His mother – “she’s incredibly intuitive” – recognised that Freyja needed a break. She suggested she come and paint some of Tilly’s pottery.
