'I like the way pots enter our lives stealthily, benignly, and exert their quiet influence. As companions, offering beauty, comfort, practical service, sensuous experience all in a modest almost subliminal way. This is the beauty of pottery — that it lives side by side with us not calling for attention, and not provoking self-consciousness. But allowing, as it were by slow release, discoveries of depth and detail.

This is why I would always make mugs, cups, drinking vessels generally. Of all pots the cup is the one we have the most intimate relation with. We raise it to our lips, we cradle it, we wash it. Daily, several times a day. We have favourites. We cast our eye over their shelved ranks. We select or reject them according to our mood or according to some inward inclination we are hardly aware of.'

James Burnett-Stuart trained at the Harrow Studio Pottery course at Harrow College of Higher Education 1986-8, having originally done a degree in English Literature at Cambridge University.

In 1989 he set up his first workshop in Ealing and moved this three years later to a boatyard on Eel Pie Island, Twickenham.