Down a bendy side road, behind the McDonald’s on Dalston’s high street, Ashwin Street expands into an array of bold, artistic buildings.
A new addition to this creative quarter is ceramics artist Nam Tran, who opened his pottery studio ‘Cernamic’ at the end of summer, offering classes to primary school children several days a week.
Speaking to the East End Review, he said: “We set up Cernamic to make pottery entirely accessible to anyone willing to give it a try.
“Since moving to Dalston, parents just love bringing their kids in.”
Mr Tran moved to the UK from Vietnam at the age of four, settling in Dalston with his family who worked in the east-end textile factories.
He first made pots as a teenager on a wheel in his bedroom and says he was captivated by the experience.
After being picked up by scouts at college, he secured a place at Central Saint Martins where he specialised in wheel thrown raku, and focused on exploring the physical properties of clay and material experimentation.
He said: “Ceramics is about sustainability of the material. I’ve always found cross-contamination with other media really interesting.”
Mr Tran has now secured a £10,000 grant from the Royal Society of Chemistry in partnership with the National Saturday Club charity, to help fund a free ceramics clay lab for young people aged between 13 and 16 years old.
Led by Mr Tran, practicing ceramicists and scientists from Imperial College London, the Saturday club will look into the science behind pottery, the geology of clay, the history of ceramics and the chemistry behind sustainable glazes.
At the end of the project, the students' work will be featured in an annual exhibition hosted in Somerset House.
Mr Tran said: "It's a really exciting opportunity for young people, especially those who aren’t from a privileged background, to learn something new.”
Ceramics has enjoyed a boom in recent years resulting in record auction prices, pottery classes bursting at the seams, Instagram superstars and innovative young artists.
A growing dissatisfaction with working and communicating digitally is one reason for the recent appetite in the craft, offering an antidote to the online world. The success of the TV show The Great Pottery Throw Down – which sees amateur potters compete to make the best ceramics – has also stoked an appreciation of pottery. Mr Tran featured as a contestant on series two in 2017.
He said: “Having that really helped because it captured new audiences.
“Ceramics has become so popular over the past 10 years. Celebrities and influencers are going viral for filming themselves using wheels and making things. I come from a different background. I grew up running around Dalston asking for opportunities and not being given them."
“I want to give young people the opportunities that I didn’t have.”
Across London, the arts scene is struggling with a crisis of affordability, driven by high living costs and UK-wide funding cuts affecting arts education and organisations.
The very building that houses Mr Tran’s studio has recently been saved from closure.
Hackney council had moved to sell off the Aswin Street studios in March, having flagged that the Victorian era building was crumbling into “dangerous disrepair” and deeming it too expensive to maintain.
Fearing a private sector “carve-up”, V22, which runs artists' workspaces in Hackney, bought the studio block from the town hall for £1million in June.
Mr Tran said: “I’m always priding the studio on what we do and always fighting for supporting kids and adults into the arts.
“I loved art when I was younger but children need the help to get into it. Growing up in a Vietnamese family, expectations leaned toward stability—steady jobs, secure futures. But clay gave me a voice, a home, and a future.”
Encouraging the younger generation of Dalston into ceramics and art is important for Mr Tran, who hopes his Saturday lab club will offer a space where creativity has no borders.
He said: “After I left Central Saint Martins I was accepted into the Royal College of Arts.
“It was a lot, a kid from the East End going to West Kensington every day and it all got on top of me so I dropped out after two years.”
After a promising start, Mr Tran found himself working in Sainsbury’s and submitted to stacking shelves for the rest of his career.
He said: “I was working on a night shift when I got a message saying my old art tutor had passed away. He’d left all his equipment, including his wheel, for me and told me to carry on doing pottery. I quit the next day and never looked back.
“Because of that catalyst I’ve made a successful career. But without that support I wouldn't be here.”
