Matilda Halley

Matilda traded places with Callum Trudgeon for six months and left Driving Creek Pottery in New Zealand to join the production team at the Leach Pottery in 2023. Matilda worked as a Studio Volunteer, hoping to improve her production skills, experience the flow of studio production in a bigger studio and to make some of her own pots in her free time.

She is from Tokomaru Bay on the East Coast of New Zealand and was fortunate to grow up around potters and craftspeople. As a child, she lived across the road from Helen Mason, the matriarch of studio pottery in New Zealand, who helped organise the first tours of Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada to New Zealand.

 Matilda started potting in Japan, where she first learnt about the Mingei philosophy and discovered the writings of Bernard Leach and Yanagi Soetsu, which have informed her journey since.

 She apprenticed for German production potter Petra Meyboden in Coromandel, New Zealand where she developed an interest in wood firing with salt and soda. Matilda has since been based at Barry Brickell’s Driving Creek Railway and Pottery.

In the autumn of 2023 Matilda, having returned to Driving Creek, will put her new skills to work, assisting Callum Trudgeon in producing a new Driving Creek Standard Ware range.