The doors are open

For one weekend the working studio in Hannover is open. Not a shop dressed up for the occasion — the actual room, with the wheel still dusty, the glaze buckets along the wall and the current firing cooling in the corner.

The full range is out on the bench to pick up and turn over: the point of stoneware is in the hand, and a photograph only gets you so far. We keep the kiln log open beside it, if you want to see exactly how a piece got its colour.

Come to look, stay for a coffee in an Oyster mug. The address and the dates go out to anyone on the studio list.

There is nothing to buy on the day that you could not buy online, and that is deliberate. It is a chance to see how a piece is actually made — the wedging, the throwing, the long wait while the kiln cools — and to understand why ten objects take the time they do.

Bring your questions about care and firing; we would rather answer them over the wheel than in a returns email. And if the current firing has cooled by the weekend, you will be among the first to see it come out.

There is dust, and we leave it. A working studio is a place where clay ends up everywhere it should not be — on the door handles, in the grain of the bench, a fine pale film over the window ledge — and wiping that away for visitors would only make it a shop pretending to be a studio.

If the timing is kind you will catch a kiln being opened: the slow unbricking, the first warm rush off the shelves, the pieces standing there still too hot to lift. It is the one part of the whole process a photograph never quite gets, and the best reason to come on the day.