AFTER two years of filling a Molong studio with clay, kilns and lots of ceramics, Jude Keogh is preparing to pack it all up.
Keogh, the owner of Earth & Fire Studio, will leave the studio’s current Gidley Street premises at the end of December, relocating the business to a new home studio in Orange.
Her final one-off pottery class at the Molong studio will be held later in the year, with the last five-week course beginning in the coming months.
She said while the decision was a difficult one, it really came down to practicality.
Keogh currently lives in Boree, where she has an existing home studio, but the distance makes it difficult to run evening classes there.
She has now bought a house in Orange where she plans to build a dedicated studio, bringing her pottery equipment and kilns together in one place.
The current studio has allowed Keogh to run regular classes, workshops and events, including her popular Pottery and Plonk sessions, children’s workshops and paint-your-own-pottery days.
But the retail side of the business makes up only a small portion of her income, while maintaining a shop and keeping it stocked with pottery is a significant amount of work.
“I sort of don’t need a shop,” she said.
The studio’s location, away from Molong’s main street, has also meant limited passing trade, something Keogh said became more noticeable after the nearby cafe closed.
“Most of my students are from Orange,” she said, with others travelling from surrounding areas.
The new home studio will also give Keogh greater flexibility to pursue her own ceramics practice, including wood firing, something that has been difficult to accommodate at her current premises.
For Keogh, pottery has been a lifelong creative pursuit.
After leaving school, she studied art and completed an Associate Diploma in Ceramics at TAFE before embarking on a 26-year career as a photographer at the Central Western Daily.
Pottery continued alongside her newspaper career, with Keogh eventually finding herself working part-time at the paper while spending the rest of her time in the studio. When she was made redundant, she decided to give pottery greater focus.
“I was sort of half-and-half at that stage, pottery and photography,” she said.
Keogh has exhibited ceramics through groups and galleries including the Corner Store Gallery in Orange and the Gang-Gang Gallery in Lithgow, while her pinhole photography has also been exhibited at Orange Regional Gallery.
For the past four years, she has taught pottery one day a week to people accessing mental health rehabilitation services.
She said the studio provided a space where students could step outside a clinical environment and create.
“They’re no longer consumers. They’re my students,” she said.
Keogh said many of her students arrived with low confidence, but creating something from start to finish could provide a powerful sense of achievement.
“They make something from start to finish and they get quite proud about their work,” she said.
“I just love passing on that feeling.”
While Earth & Fire will soon have a new home, Keogh said leaving Molong would be bittersweet.
“I love Molong and love being here,” she said. “It’s going to sting a bit.”
But she said the move was a necessary one for the business and thanked the Molong community and local businesses for their support during her time in the town.
“As much as it pains me to go, it’s sort of like a necessary move for me,” she said.