About me
I’m Gillian, the potter behind Gillybean Pottery. I’m originally from Galway, but have lived in Belfast for most of my adult life.
I fell in love with pottery when I was a little girl, enthralled with the wheel in my pottery class. I remember not having enough strength in my small hands to center clay on the wheel so I would follow my pottery teacher around relentlessly to ask him to center me a piece of clay. He was always so patient!
Fast forward a few decades and the lure of making things with clay just didn't subside. I would dip in and out, but life was busy. A hectic career in the charity sector and then 3 children meant years passed by during which I thought 'pottery will come'.
Then in 2019 I left my full time job and became a part time classroom assistant. This finally gave me enough time, space and mental energy to take ceramics a little more seriously, so I took some classes at the Ulster University here in Belfast.
Then lockdown put everyone’s life on hold and attending the college was no longer an option. I knew I had to find ways to keep making. So I took the plunge and bought myself a pottery wheel.
It had nowhere to live so I used it in our garden for 3 months before eventually hijacking an outside office that we'd been using for home working.
Lockdown gave me an opportunity to practice every day and work out what to include in some of the collections that you can now see on this site. Pottery as a business as well as a hobby had arrived!
I like to think that the calm satisfaction of the pottery process and my utter love of making passes on to the owner with every piece.
Thank you for joining me along the way. X