For Sophia McEvoy, ceramics began with a simple premise: that you can take raw earth – or “mud” – and turn it into something you live with every day. “I liked the idea that you can use such a rudimentary material to make something that will last and is functional,” she reflects. Though at sixteen, her reasons for taking up the craft were born more from curiosity. “I hadn’t really dabbled with pottery before, and I wanted to try something new.”
She was also drawn to the meditative, rhythmic practice of working with her hands. In a routine dominated by exam preparation and nightly homework, it offered “a different kind of thought, a different kind of creativity.” At school, she learned hand-building techniques rather than throwing, forming vessels from rolled coils and slabs. It gave her a foundational understanding of how clay behaves, its limits and its possibilities.
From the beginning, Sophia had a clear vision of her output. She wanted to create items for the home, grounded in utility but beautiful to look at and satisfying to hold. “I was never trying to say anything profound through my work – I just wanted to create pieces I could use.” At university, she experimented with sculpture, but graduated without the practical skills she needed to bring her vision to life. “It was an artistic experience, but it wasn't quite what I'd hoped it would be.”
In 2017, Sophia finally gave in to the wheel’s persistent pull. By this time, she had drifted further and further from any form of making: “Around full-time teaching and training, I couldn’t even touch it. I had to take a big leap of faith.” Leaving her teaching role at the school where she had first tried ceramics, she poured her savings into building a pottery studio in her parents’ garden in Suffolk. She bought a wheel before she knew how to use one, teaching herself over the next two years through a combination of online tutorials and trial and error. “I remember sitting at the wheel and feeling the weight of having quit my job to start this business. It took so long for me to start selling because it was such an immense skill – you never really master it.”
She always wanted to mix her own glazes, so she developed the skill alongside wheel throwing – months of testing, tweaking and getting to grips with the science behind the process followed. This decision gave her full control over her work, allowing her to carry a vision of form and colour from concept to tangible object, and instilling even greater pride in the finished result. “I wanted to be able to say I’d taken a ball of mud and, with my own hands, turned it into that shape. I wanted to mix the glazes myself and know they were mine, that I’d really spent time on them.”
Spending long days in the garden, observing the changing seasons as she threw pot after pot, colours from nature organically filtered into her work. “I’m in the garden every single day, watching the way it slowly moves from spring to summer, autumn to winter,” she says. “The harmonious colour palettes and textures that I see out in the world definitely make their way in.”
The vases she has created for the TOAST Autumn Winter 2026 collection reflect a time of transition, when the bright greens of summer deepen and intensify as autumn rolls in. “The forest glaze is a verdant green with hints of blue that evokes the last throes of summer,” Sophia explains. “Then we move towards an earthier ochre with toffee, which coincides with the harvest. I wanted to capture those honeyed umbers that emerge when the leaves have changed.” The third vase in the series is coated in a flint brown glaze, intended to conjure the tree bark and woodland soil that shift into focus when the leaves fall away. “It’s a kind of beautiful bleakness, when things become a bit more bare.”
Sophia has these feelings and images in mind as she makes, but she also imagines the environments her pieces might inhabit. Historic homes, farm buildings and “townhouses filled with character and collections of things” are a constant source of inspiration. “I've always tried to make work that bridges the gap between contemporary living and those heritage spaces. My ceramics try to hark back to period features, pulling from their colours, textures and atmosphere.” She is drawn to the handmade quality woven through older interiors, balanced with a sense of refinement and underpinned by a genuine affinity for the objects that accompany everyday life.
“It’s that conscious, considered collecting of items over time,” she says. “That’s what I love about beautiful old townhouses, full to the brim with a life well lived – a history of collecting, of travelling, of speaking to artists, of seeing something you love and bringing it home. Somehow it all works together because it’s been sensitively and authentically curated.”
Words by Bébhinn Campbell.
Photography by Aloha Bonser-Shaw.
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