For many months after skin cancer surgery, Linda Pitcher couldn’t leave the house. She avoided answering the front door, and if she had to go into her local village, she wore a hat and pulled it low. Now, at 61, she is taking part in her first major ceramics exhibition, at London’s New Designers next month, where she will look visitors in the eye. “It’s nerve-racking. But I’m going,” she says.
Pitcher has not only had to overcome cancer, but also post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) triggered by the surgery, which entailed removing a large part of her nose. When the bandages were unwound after her first skin graft, the nurse held up a full-length mirror. “I fainted. I was sitting down, but I fell to the right. Half my nose had gone. Then you’ve got to walk out to your life and see people. No, no,” she says. “There was no support. I was so self-conscious.”
Desperate for a way out of depression, social anxiety and PTSD, Pitcher embarked on a course of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). With the therapist’s encouragement, she went to the supermarket in nearby Hereford. She managed a conversation at the counter. She made progress.
“What do you miss?” her therapist asked.
“Sketching on location,” Pitcher replied. She had struggled at school in Leicester, where she had taken A-levels in science. “I worked my back off and I still got bad grades, and I never forgave myself,” she says. In 2022, she was diagnosed with dyslexia, but as a child, “I just thought I was thick.”
Instead, she had always gravitated to mark-making. After saying goodnight to her parents, she’d sneak out of bed and “start working with pastels”. As she got older, she’d “go into the city and draw” – in Leicester, where she lived, or Birmingham – “and capture people’s expressions”. Now, she sees that sketching was “a way of talking”.
Pitcher had a succession of jobs – selling tickets in a bus station, graphic designer, print sales representative, administrator at a hospital. She married, had two children and, over the decades, she continued to sketch.
At 58, she embarked on a degree in contemporary design crafts at Hereford College of Arts. She had taken A-level art at night school in her 30s. (“I took a bottle of wine in, had a drink and just painted. Got an A grade for that,” she says.) She started her degree certain that she was going to become a printer. Instead, “I walked out going, ‘There’s something about ceramics, the feel, the process. The fight with that material.’
“I could see a path ahead which I never – never, never – thought I would attain. And I got a degree! This person who thought they were so thick.”
Her approach to ceramics entails drawing on to bisque vessels – white, blank, after a first firing – on location.
Linda Pitcher with a collection of her pottery. Photograph: Joann Randles/The Guardian
She loves porcelain – “the hardest medium”. It’s “like throwing cream cheese. It knows your mood. You throw it on to the wheel and you can feel it as it’s centring, the trouble you’ve got. If you’re stressed, it will pick you up. It’s the chase I enjoy. Will it work, will it not work, will the sides collapse?”
You keep going. Exactly the same every day. You pick your head up and go
She often knows how the porcelain feels. “It’s having the resilience – and I use that word – because when things go wrong when you’re throwing, you have to rethrow or the pots will stress-crack. It’s like me,” she says. “You keep going. Exactly the same every day. You lift your head up and go.”
Her focus is on drawing on to the ceramic in a way that “people can see the drawing, but the vessel can have colour too. You don’t want your voice as a mark-maker to be hidden by colour.”
These are the problems Pitcher works through, out on location, in Hereford, London or Bath, while strangers stop to chat. “People give their life stories. The attention deflects. You are no longer the focus. As you draw, you’re listening. You catch the speed of it,” she says. It all goes into or on to the pot. Each one contains so much.
Pitcher still finds “every day a struggle”. But some things have changed. “Now, when I talk, I look at people. And I forget I’m doing it.” Completing her degree, working with porcelain – she won the great northern contemporary crafter award – has “given me worth, drive, motivation and confidence. It’s given me my life back.”
New Designers is at the Business Design Centre in London, from 2 to 12 July
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