My friend Sally Dawson, who has died aged 90, was a talented potter and gifted teacher. Sally’s work was widely sold, exhibited and collected. She was a member of the Craft Potters Association and a contemporary of Bernard Leach and Michael Casson.
One of three daughters of Harold and Blanche Dawson, Sally was born in Montreal, Canada, where her father ran the Dawson Brothers Stationers company. As a young woman, Sally drove a van for a missionary organisation reaching remote families in far-flung parts of Canada. She regularly ended up in the ditch and her driving never improved.
In search of wider artistic opportunities, she moved to London in 1963, starting out in a tiny basement studio in Canonbury Square, north London, and studying at the Sir John Cass School of Art. Her work was well received and she quickly developed a reputation for her imaginative pots and her skill as a teacher.
Eventually she purchased a scruffy house in Albion Square, Hackney. She transformed the place, painstakingly restoring it and filling it with artworks, her own – single pieces in, at first, oxidised stoneware and, later, crackle-glazed porcelain – and that of other artists. The house became a meeting place for all manner of creative people and remained so for over 40 years.
Sally never lost her Canadian accent and enjoyed visits to the country of her birth, but she became a true Londoner. She loved the city, its culture and its people, never missed a good exhibition or new opera, and was brave and eclectic in her taste for theatre and art. She was an imaginative cook and had a wicked, dry sense of humour. Everyone who passed through her wonderful home mattered to her and she had the knack of connecting with people of all ages, from many different parts of the world.
I met Sally when I was eight years old. She came to teach pottery classes at the art studio my parents set up in the Welsh mountains. Later, she introduced me to the serious business of drinking Tio Pepe sherry, and Shakespeare and opera, and she always encouraged me in my wish to become a writer.
Sally’s sisters Naomi, a chemist, and Mary, a nun, predeceased her.
