LOTTE GLOB was born in Denmark but has spent most of her life in the top left corner of Scotland.

“I WAS transplanted here from Denmark a long time ago and I have grown very deep roots,” she says.

HER croft in Laid, overlooking Loch Eriboll, is a tumult of flowers and lush growth, with fruit hanging from trees, a huge contrast to the stark, overgrazed land nearby. Among the plants are her distinctive ceramic sculptures, some apparently in full song, some hiding, some jostling or making welcoming gestures. Many raise a smile.

Lotte Glob (photo Mandy Haggith)

Lotte describes the croft as her canvas, and this summer, she opened it to the public. “I had a big retrospective exhibition in Denmark a couple of years ago and people said why don’t you have something similar in Scotland? I said I’d have one on my own croft, so I set up my studio as a gallery. I still have some of my work from the 1960s, so it’s 50 years of clay. It has been open for weeks and it’s a lot of work. I’m tired now.”

Earlier this year she had a major exhibition of her life’s work at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow. She was delighted by the curator’s choice of pieces. “They were mostly from the croft, so I like to say they went for a city break. They still had grass between their toes, you know! And it was fascinating to see them in a totally different setting.”

When I ask what’s next she says, “I have lots of ideas but when you ask what I’m working on at the moment I say nothing!,” She laughs, not willing to be drawn. “There are too many things going on in my head!”

Playfully, or perhaps seriously, and perhaps both, she suggests that now she will get a JCB earthmover onto the croft, dig a big hole and throw all of her work so far into it, then cover it over and plant it with flowers. “Then I’ll have a lovely blank canvas,” she says, “and my daughter can use it as a bank after I’m dead.”

One of the pieces she has installed on her croft is a ceramic river flowing down to the sea, made of tiles from 185 walks. “It was a kind of diary,” she says. “On each walk, I would take a rock home to fire in a tile, because I’m really interested in how rocks melt.”

Lotte Glob - Rock Dish

This interest began years back, when she started experimenting by firing different kinds of soils, then moved onto stones. “I was grinding up feldspar and mixing it with clay, and I asked what would happen if I put a bigger bit into the kiln, and people said it’d explode. Well that meant I had to try! And it didn’t explode. So I used bigger bits.

“I always need to have enough mugs and soup bowls to pay for my experiments, but I’m not too cautious! Now I’ve been firing these rocks at very high temperatures since the 1980s and I’m getting to know which ones crack and which ones flow.”

No one makes ceramics that better suit the term ‘stoneware’ than Lotte. For years she has been making stone books and, explaining their origin, she says, “I love rocks and walking in the hills. I’ve always thought they look like giant bookshelves from long ago. The stone books are all just there. Whenever I’m up in the hills I bring things back: stones, bits of earth, lichens, little things I write down, and then I come home and fuse them all into the book so that it’s all there, hidden between the leaves.

“People say it’s a pity we can’t open them and I say you don’t need to spell everything out. You can feel it.” It’s the continuation of a story that has been told for billions of years.

Lotte Glob - Bookland

Ceramics is an ancient art, combining the elements of earth, air, fire and water, and culminating in the kiln with its unpredictable results. Lotte says, “I always used to say to my children when I fired my big kiln in Balnakeil, come and look at the dragon, with flames coming out of its mouth!”

She is keeping the family tradition going, and proudly shows a photograph of her granddaughter already playing with clay. “When she helped me to open the kiln it was so lovely, she was like, ‘Oh, it’s magic’, and it is magic! That’s why I have to keep doing it. I can’t do without that drug!”

Lotte’s obsession started early. “I’ve always been using clay,” she says. “Since I was little, I was always out roaming and finding clay in the forest. I tried to fire it in my mum’s Raeburn, in the oven, but it didn’t work, then I put it in where the flames were and it exploded and I got told off!

“Then when I was 13 we had a school trip to Bonholme [the famous Danish art and design college] and I saw a pot being made on a wheel for the first time and I was absolutely fascinated. They couldn’t get me away. I can still see myself back there: I can see them throwing, I can feel the whole atmosphere and I can smell it. I came home, said I wanted to be a potter and begged for a wheel. Then I just sat in a shed, throwing, practising and practising.

“I was very bad at school, I hated it, and at 14 they had to let me go into an apprenticeship with Gutte Eriksen. She was a very good teacher.”

After two years she went to Sorring Pottery and continued training, making chicken feeders by day and doing her own thing in the evening. Then a family friend suggested a contact in Ireland. While she waited for the arrangements to be made, she says, “I sat in the pig shed behind all the pigs, throwing pots like mad, then I fired them in the farm’s straw fires.”

Aged just 19 she went to Ireland. “That was exciting, but of course I couldn’t speak any English so it was very hard for me because I was very shy. I didn’t speak, basically, for two months. I’ve never been so creative in my life. Somehow, you know, you have to speak!”

From Ireland, she came to Scotland. “I arrived in Scotland the best way anyone can arrive – from Dublin to Glasgow by cattle boat. After a night of whisky and singing, I sailed up the Clyde in the early morning, with mist and cranes and the mountains in the background – fantastic!”

She went to work with a potter in Morar, near Oban, where she met her future partner, David Illingworth. She returned to Denmark, but was hooked. “After three months, someone showed me a picture of Scotland and I had to go back, immediately!”

Within a couple of years, with a baby daughter and another on the way, Lotte made the move permanent. In 1968, after a year at a pottery on the Isle of Pabay off Skye, she and her partner were desperately looking for a place to stay.

“We had a tonne of clay, a wheel and an electric kiln, and we heard about Balnakeil. So that was it!” She has been in north west Sutherland ever since, moving eventually out of the craft village to the croft along the north coast at Laid.

Lotte’s sculptures are now found not only on her croft, but all over the north west Highlands, thanks to an organic, unplanned process that ‘just grew’, she says.

“I had been trying to promote myself in galleries in places like London. It was horrendous, I hated it. Some people were so horrible. By the time I got back I was really depressed, and when I get depressed I always go for a walk. I had always wanted to go from Cape Wrath to Sandwood Bay. I had my rucksack with my camera and some food and I saw some of those pots I’d been trying to promote and I thought I’m taking them back where they belong. I was angry, you know?

“So off I went. When you walk, your spirit rises. I sat down in a lovely spot and had to take this pot out to get my sandwiches. I put it down and then I thought, doesn’t that look beautiful there! Then I got excited, and I thought, I’ll just leave it here, it goes with the colours. I walked on, then looked back to take a picture and an oyster catcher was sitting on it. I was delighted. Recognition at last! Then I thought, wouldn’t it be nice to put another one over there, and that’s how it went on.”

Lotte Glob (photo Mandy Haggith)

Eventually 75 pieces found their way to what Lotte came to call her ‘pot spots’, in remote, beautiful locations along the north coast and down the west to Skye. Some she still visits, some are in crevices on rocky places so exposed she wouldn’t have the nerve to go there these days and most will remain undisturbed as part of a huge, free, unjudged and unjudging exhibition space.

“The first few were too obvious,” she says, “but a lot of them no-one will ever find.” She loves the idea of mosses and lichens growing on them, or a mouse nesting in one, and even when people find them and move them or take them away, she is unworried.

In a similar vein, she took to leaving floating stones in lochans. The idea ‘invented her’, she said, when she was making shiny ceramic pebbles for her fish tank, and one floated. She made another, and then bigger ones. With them, she has created some magical events: one night, at 3.30 am under a full moon at Balnakeil beach, a ring of 333 ceramic bubbles floated on the rising tide.

Given her inspiration with all things natural, it’s no surprise that the sea is one of Lotte’s canvases. During the millennium year, she flung floating stones into the sea at Fairead Head three times a month, and they have come back to her from as far afield as Shetland, which is lovely, she says, but mostly she enjoys “the stories inside my head about them getting caught up in ice in Greenland or ending up in a whale’s stomach!”

This is art completely unmediated by the establishment or commercial interests. “It’s kind of self-indulgent but it’s also a way of sharing things,” she says. “You do things because you have this idea, this vision, and you have to do it otherwise you’ll explode. And then it’s like a  child with a drawing, you want to show it to someone and say ‘look what I’ve done!’ And I love it when people like it. I love it when they smile, it’s such a nice feeling.”

Lotte’s work is on sale at Durness Stonecraft, Kilmorack Gallery and the Watermill in Aberfeldy. Her croft is open by appointment.

© Mandy Haggith, 2011

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