Meet a Maker: Edition 30

Meet Jof Hicks

1. What is your craft and how did you get into it?

My name is Jof Hicks and I am a designer/maker based in Agnes, Isles of Scilly UK. I grow and build Scillonian withy/tamarisk lobster pots to use as a commercial fisherman with zero plastic gear and by sail/oar.

My background has always been crafts and making. I grew up on the Isles of Scilly on a small farm doing a bit of fishing and a lot of making. I left and went to Glasgow School of Arts and trained as an industrial designer in the ‘90s. As an industrial designer, I worked a few jobs from London to San Francisco, but I always knew I was going to end up coming back home. The draw of the islands and the southwest of England is pretty strong. About 25 to 30 years ago, I was taught by Brian Richard who was still fishing and making withy pots by the hundred in the late ’90s. He must have been in his ’70s or ’80s then, but he was still fishing full-time and making pots. For a week or two, Brian taught me how to make the pots. I was always drawn to the craft of it as well as the appropriate technologies. I was fascinated with what you could grow and make locally, especially on an island with limited resources. There was something instinctive that I thought was interesting about the natural cycle of making withy pots. I planted a lot of willow around Scilly then, 30 years ago, but I naively didn’t really understand the environment. A lot of it did not grow, yet I kept it on the back boiler, making a few pots every winter just to try and keep my hand in the craft and not lose the skill.

Then six years ago, I just took the plunge to resurrect the craft in my own workshop and try to make it a full-time job. I harvested the willow that I had planted along with abundant tamarisk on the islands. There are remnants of the old fishermen’s withy beds and I inherited one bed on the main island of St. Mary’s and a couple of other areas that are suitable for growing and have been supported by the local council. Our landscape has changed hugely in the last couple of hundred years on the subtropical island, and there are unbelievable Mediterranean, South African, Australian, Tasmanian plant species. I experimented with different materials and designs for my withy pots, but generally I use tamarisk and willow. There’s twelve main frame bars that are tamarisk in the pot and much of the base is tamarisk too. However, the last center row of the base tends to be willow because it works better for the tight little last row or two.

Much of the ethos around my work is closing the circles of the distance between the different processes around pot fishing. This not only includes the growing, making, and fishing, but also limiting transport and carbon footprint, etc. I’m full-time on this project; growing, harvesting, and clearing weeds. I’m hoping to make 50 pots this season out of the material I have prepared, which is the most I would have worked to date. We’re so weather beaten in Scilly that I know from my endeavors that the salt wind just burns everything. I think historically, the fishermen who were making 100 to 150 pots for commercial fishing in the ‘60s and ‘70s must have had to have brought in material. However, I want to draw us back to how much we did locally and still can do all locally.

I was determined that it would be a real fishing project. I didn’t have any grant money to set up. I didn’t have any assistance other than the right to pollard these little bits of land. I wanted to make the pots and to fish with them engine-free to support my mission that what I was doing was as close as possible to carbon-free. Therefore, I fish with a sail and oar.

2. What is one interesting fact about you?

I’ve got a weakness for British Blue cats. I have one named Appa.

3. How long have you been making?

I have been making all my life. I have been full-time growing, making, and commercially fishing for six years with my zero plastic and emissions practice.

4. Who are your favourite makers? 

There is Nigel Legge and Dave French of course making various withy pots in the Southwest. In terms of surviving pot makers in Scilly, there’s a handful of fishermen that I know and chat to a little bit that made pots when they were young. One guy in particular named Barry is good. He is semi-retired and still fishes with one or two pots he makes. He’s got a couple of withies in his garden and a little bit of farmland, and he makes a couple of pots to keep his hand in every winter.

5. What is the most challenging skill/technique you learned in your craft?

One of the important things to note about making pots is that you’ve got to make them in numbers and you’ve got to fish them. You need to fish them as commercially as possible to begin to try and understand the craft. One can definitely make a pot that looks a bit like a lobster pot. But until you’ve tried to have it on the seabed in the Southwest of England for six months, you actually don’t know what it is. It might look like a lobster pot, but it hasn’t held together and caught any fish. There is a lot of experimentation and knowledge that those past makers knew about the pots that’s disappearing. I am still at the tip of the iceberg in understanding all the various styles and ways to best fish with these pots. However, the conservation of the craft is a cornerstone of my project and I’ll keep making these pots in this form as a record of a Scillonian pot.

I think one of the main differences in pot making in Scilly compared to other parts of England is that the frame bars go through the whole pot, which means the neck has 48 frame bars. I am not adding frame bars at any other point, which makes the whole pot stronger. Therefore, there is proper density to the frame and the weaving, as well as a heavier duty base. Scillonian pots need this sturdier structure to be used in the islands’ tough water terrains that have sharp uneven granite.

6. What is your favourite part of your craft? 

It’s stopping. I’ve been cranking out pots and I’m both sick of it and love it. I can’t wait to stop. My hands, elbows, and back are hurting and I can’t wait to do a couple of days on the moors, because I think that’ll be a bit of a relief. But I also can’t wait to start again in October/November.

There’s some iconic parts of the craft, the weaving of the binding, the spiral. Just that spiral binding down is always quite mesmerizing. The first rotation, the neck is always amazing because quickly, you’ve got the start of a pot.

7. What project are you most proud of and why?

I’ve been bowled over by the positivity of the little withy pot community, from a few old boys around the Southwest to Anna Pope and her colleagues researching and recording elements of it with the folklore and history to the positivity of various organizations wanting to support me with coppicing bits of land. I thought it was going to be difficult to communicate the project of zero plastic fishing and it was going to be seen as pretty eccentric. I’m really proud that the project has been met with such supportive attitudes.

If anything, I’m pleased I took the plunge to do it because I’ve been thinking and worrying about these issues for decades about pollution and the appropriate technologies for fishing. Even when there are areas where we’re concerned and we’re trying to educate ourselves about these issues, it’s just astounding how brainwashed we all are, how hardwired we are into our consumer behavior. On my first day, six years ago, even though I’d obviously fished before and I’d fished with the pots before, I rode out to try and catch the first lobster to sell and did that. I thought, “my goodness, I’ve just got sticks from the hedge with a secateurs and a knife, made these parts, carried them walking distance with a trolley to my workshop, and then walked down the key to my mooring and rode out to try and catch some lobster for somebody.” None of that cost me. I’m pretty convinced that my footprint on the planet from this whole activity is either as low as I can get it as a modern human and possibly even beneficial as far as the planting and the growing of the trees. That has been quite profound for me.

8. If someone who knows nothing about you and your practice could know one thing, what would it be?

I am amazed at how hardwired I am and I constantly find myself saying, “Oh, I don’t expect in any way the main mainstream fishers to adopt these methods again.” Yet we’ve got to make massive changes. We all can. I’ve worked and lived in London. I know that we’re hugely urban, but we can make the most unbelievable changes and try to either preserve what’s fundamentally important from the past and learn from it to help us develop things that we’re going to need in the future. I make the pots because the past informs how we might then progress.

I can’t fish with anything else plastic-free at the moment. What was around for hundreds of thousands of years is actually what’s available to me now. I’m a trained industrial designer. I thought I respected that and its traditions. Even though I was going to keep the heritage skills alive and make the traditional Scillonian pot, I also thought within a year or two, I would be fishing them alongside hybrid prototype pots that were a combination of other materials and still have a low impact on the environment. Yet time and time again, it’s not applicable. Stainless steel pot buoys sound innovative until one thinks about the manufacturing, the mining of the ore, the transport of the ore, the production and shipment of the steel. We think we’re creating solutions, and in many ways we are. But the structures and systems that need support might be connected with these time-proven methods. That never ceases to amaze me.