About Me

I’m an inventor, designer and maker. I’m fascinated by the challenge of making something that doesn’t yet exist — and particularly by working out how to make it.

My approach owes something to my first career as a chartered civil engineer, although I’m probably more interested in solving the interesting problems than in getting bogged down in the details. I enjoy understanding how things work, finding ways around technical difficulties and, above all, inventing new making processes. My career subsequently took me into journalism and internet publishing, before I returned to making and gained a First-Class BA (Hons) in Contemporary Craft from Plymouth College of Art in 2018. My degree project, The Snake Pit, was selected as a “pick of the show” at the London Design Fair.

I’ve always been at least as interested in how something is made as in what is made. Many of my projects start with a problem rather than a finished idea: how can I produce this shape, construct this mechanism, manipulate this material or achieve a particular effect? Working out the answer is often the most enjoyable part.

My Teapot project is a good example. Each teapot presented a different technical and creative challenge, requiring me to invent new ways of making it. That process of experimentation, improvisation and problem-solving is something I try to document throughout this website. It is less a catalogue of finished objects than a record of the journeys that produced them — the experiments, failures, discoveries and solutions.

I rarely begin a project by deciding what material I am going to work in. Usually there is an idea first, and I follow it to see what materials and processes might make it possible.

United by the Sea, a major community art project in Looe, is a good example. Running past the Lower Quay Stores, I saw a 60-metre-long white wall and immediately thought: What a great site for a mural. At that stage I was imagining a painted mural.

Then came the suggestion that the local schools should be involved. Initially I couldn’t see how that would work without losing control of the design. But when I met the school’s head of art, she suggested ceramic fish: the children could make the individual fish while we retained control of the overall design. That changed the idea completely.

From there came a whole series of new problems to solve: how to prepare clay for hundreds of children, how to fire and glaze hundreds of fish, how to involve volunteers, and eventually how to install the finished work on the wall. I bought and refurbished a kiln, developed the practical processes needed to handle the scale of the project, and recruited and coordinated more than 30 local volunteers who helped with the glazing. The fish are now made; the next stage is to install them as a huge community artwork on Looe’s Lower Quay Stores.

The project has also made me realise that orchestrating is an important part of what I do. I enjoy not only inventing and making things myself, but working out how an ambitious idea can actually happen — what needs to be made, what processes need to be devised, what problems need solving, and who needs to be involved. Getting hundreds of children and more than 30 volunteers to contribute to a single artwork is, in its own way, another kind of making.

This is typical of the way my projects develop. The idea leads to a problem; the problem leads to experimentation; and the experimentation leads to materials, techniques and processes I may never have considered at the outset. I’ve worked in metal, glass and ceramics, but also with chocolate, tea leaves, recycled cans and all sorts of other unlikely materials. I’m less interested in having a particular medium than in discovering what a material can be made to do.

That is why this website is deliberately as much about making as about the things I have made. The finished object is the evidence that the process worked. What really interests me is figuring out the process in the first place.

Peter Heywood's CV (September 2026)

 Mockup of the proposed United by the Sea mural comprising hundreds of ceramic fish made by local schoolchildren