Ceramicist Shelley Simpson created Mud Australia back in 1994 from her home base of Sydney, Australia, and we’ve been partners with the brand since our early days as well. Mud is known for its minimalist, handmade aesthetic that’s as beautiful as it is durable—as Shelley notes herself, she created it to feel “lovely to eat out of… but it needs to go in the dishwasher.” We caught up with Shelley as she visited Toronto on a five-week tour around North America. 

Why don’t we start with your own journey: what inspired you to focus on ceramics?

I’d moved from Melbourne, which is the largest city now in Australia, to Sydney in about 1992. I’d been working doing bits of acting, bits of singing, but never really connecting properly. I thought it was my creative passion, but obviously it wasn’t. I don’t feel like I was very good at the self-promotion part of it, and so consequently I spent a lot of time in restaurants, waitering and doing front of house and that sort of thing. And then eventually, I moved into a share house with somebody who had a little pottery shed in the backyard, and she said to me, you should have a go. You’d really like it. And I probably could think of nothing worse than getting covered in dirt. 

To cut a long, long story very short, one day I was on my own in the house and I just went into the back shed and started mucking around with clay. I’d never been shown what to do, but I think I’d seen something on Sesame Street or one of those kids shows. And I just started mucking around and she came back. I’d made all these shapes, and she said, how did you do that?!

Not only was it on a wheel, but it was also on a kick wheel, which is not motorized—you use your foot to make it go. So, it was quite a challenging beginning, and I just loved it. I got a few tips from her, and I was just making all these really, incredibly ugly things that I would get fired somewhere and gift to my friends, and they’d give me all this encouragement. If it weren’t for my friends saying how beautiful they thought things were, I wouldn’t have kept going. 

From there, after my friends were given lots of hideous things, I started asking questions of different people. I went to my favourite homeware store, and I said, what are the things that you need? What are you looking for that you can’t get? And I’d take the information away and I’d sit in my studio and ponder it and make my interpretation of what that was—and that eventually became the Mud product.

People were looking for simple things, uncluttered—which was great for me because I was not very good at making yet. In the beginning you work with the easiest clays, which is an earthenware clay. And then I knew that that was not going to be something that could withstand a restaurant environment or even the rigours of the home environment. I wanted something that would last and was not going to become a burden in people’s kitchens.

So, I stepped away and had to learn how to work with porcelain, which is a difficult thing to do. And then I wanted colour. I liked a matte surface, and most glazes become shiny when you get to the temperatures of porcelain, and so I decided to put the colour into the clay, so it didn’t have to have a glaze, and it gave you this really lovely matte finish. 

The product is just all unglazed and porcelain. When it’s vitrified, unglazed is amazing. It’s got incredible properties that can withstand a lot of torture in a home environment.

How do you describe your design aesthetic? 

I think it’s just simple. It started being quite simple because I didn’t know how to make complicated things, but then it was interesting. I had a studio in the inner city of Sydney that was quite close to where all the different magazines were. Donna Hay was around the corner. People from Elle Decoration and Belle and all the beautiful magazines were close by where the ceramic studio was, and people would pop in and say I’m looking for this and I’m looking for that. I got encouragement with simplicity because it photographed really beautifully—when you don’t have a lot of edge and you don’t have a lot of shine, that leads to these lovely photographs. So we’d get featured in magazines and went into cookbooks. And then people started looking for the bowl and the plate that was in the cookbook.

Tell us about your design process. You’ve got a lighting line coming out, for example—where does it start for you?

I’ll have an idea in my head that just sits in my head for a while, and I’ll think about it and think about it. Then I start to play—I usually just get some raw clay and hand-build something. I used to throw everything, but I don’t do that anymore because my mould makers don’t like me coming with a finished product, they’d like me to draw it. I start by hand building something small. I have just done this little series of bells that we’re doing for the trees for Christmas, and I just hand built those. I took those to my mould maker and said, can we do this? And then the mould comes back, and it’s tweaking backwards and forwards a little bit. It took a few trials, and they’ve just been photographed. 

When it’s something like the lighting and the lamp collection, I engaged an industrial designer to work with me: Zachary Hanna worked with me on the lamps that we’ve just launched. If it’s not my skill set, I absolutely know when to put my hand up and ask for help.

That was an interesting process, because it was working with somebody who knows lots of different materials, but wasn’t aware of the idiosyncratic nature of porcelain: teaching them about how porcelain works and how it moves on a kiln shelf as it’s shrinking in its firing stages, that kind of thing—it was quite a process.

And why lighting?

The thing I love the most about Mud is where the light hits the rim. You we have these very beautiful fine rims, and we work very hard to keep them lovely to put to your mouth or lovely to eat out of, but when the light hits it, it’s also beautiful. And I’ve made some very basic lamps for my own use at home in the past, and I really want to do this, but I didn’t have the person to do it with. And Zach was there, and it was great. 

From the very beginning—it was the things I need in my house. And I test everything really well. It’s not a fashion statement. It’s about having something beautiful to live with, but it needs to go in the dishwasher. I want to be able to put it in the oven and roast something in it and take it straight to the table. And with the lights, they have got to work.

I’m intrigued by your commitment keeping the line handmade, despite the scale of your company. Why is that part of the process important to you?

I just think that craft is such an important part of our culture. I think it’s become cool again to make ceramics, but there are times when it wanes and comes in and out of fashion. But there’s a lot of people going to art school who need a job when they walk out the door, they want to do their own practice. They want to be able to work in the studio and I love the process. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how many years I’ve been doing this for, I like going in and being able to spend time with my team working with clay. There are some things that are difficult, some things that are frustrating, and maybe economically it would make more sense: you’ll get a flatter plate made by a machine. But there are big companies out there that are producing lots of these machine-made pieces. They don’t need me to do it. 

I think it’s also important, when you think about what’s happening globally and how we create these nests that we retreat to, it’s really important to have things that feel like somebody’s touched them. I like a drip of glaze and I like a handprint. I like a thumbprint, a little indent where somebody’s touched something before. It feels familiar, and a bit cozy. There’s something really quite comforting about having handmade around you.

Sustainability is a big part of your practice, too. How has that evolved over time?

Yes, I knew that ceramics used a lot of power. We’ve got to fire it. It has to be plugged in, and it has to go to a certain temperature. And very early on in our last studio, we put a lot of solar panels on the roof. In Australia, we’ve got a lot of sun all year round, so we can safely have a third of our power coming from the sun. And you can buy green power now in Australia, and it’s coming from renewables. And then we just started looking at everything, like packaging—to be able to transition from plastic bubble wraps and things like that to full paper. Every decision we make in the studio, when we’re talking about new things, we always bring that up as one of the very first points of the call. We’ve got rainwater capture from the roof for washing out buckets, so we’re not taking fresh drinking water from the taps—we really do think about it. And if you are a parent, you do care about what you’re leaving behind.

I also didn’t think I could do it, but the more you do, the more you can. And I guess my message to people who haven’t thought about it: just take one step in a direction and everything writes itself.

Why don’t we talk a little bit about your relationship with Provide. What drew you to working with us? 

We met at a trade show—it was a very exciting time for me. I’d come from Sydney, and I flew to a Paris trade show and another in New York, just because I wanted the adventure myself. Australia is a good market for us, but I wanted to see what else we could do globally, and I was really surprised at how quickly different regions just embraced the same pieces. And it’s fantastic to be in Vancouver. We’ve had some really interesting orders that have come through Provide and it’s been a really easy relationship.

What role do specialized retail outlets like Provide play in your business?

It’s so important—we don’t have big marketing budgets. We have what I still consider us to be a smallish company in the scheme of things, and we really rely on getting the word out with other people who do an excellent job at retail. We’re a speck in the ocean, and nobody really knows about us. So having these incredible, incredibly well-run retail stores that can be one of your signposts is really important. 

It really does show quite quickly when you start working with a company, whether they’re going to have that passion that you need and that they will listen to the information that you give them around the product. Because if you don’t—I mean, I’ve walked into stores where people have said, oh, you can’t put anything hot in this. Well, that’s not true. And you can actually put it in the oven and bake a roasted chicken in one of my bowls. It doesn’t have to be just something that’s kept for best in a corner. So having people who can really get behind the storytelling and listen to what you have is absolutely essential.

Is there an essential piece that you would recommend if somebody’s starting to collect Mud Australia? 
The beauty of Mud is that there’s 19 colours and 100 different profiles, so there’s a lot of combinations. The Pebble Bowl Large is a beautiful piece to have in your home, and it’s multifunctional, so it could be a fruit bowl, you can have salad in it, but you can, as I said, put a chicken in it, put it in the oven, roast it, bring it to the table. It’s a great wedding present, and I think it’s great for hostess gifts. But it’s just a lovely place to have in your home.

Shop Provide's collection by Mud Australia in our Fir Street location and online Store.

Photography by Seth Stevenson & courtesy of Mud Australia