Beauty, Love and Grief - Revisited, 7 years on.

I wrote the first version of this in 2019. Beauty. Love and Grief, 2019 I feel I need to revisit it now as life shifts again.

The rawness of losing my dad and my brother in 2014 and 2015 has softened and become something I carry more quietly. I have made peace with the fact that death is inevitable. No one gets out of here alive. And rather than that being a dark thought, I find it clarifying. Life is precious precisely because of this.

I got divorced in 2024, a tough decision but one I had to make if I was to live a life that honoured my principles, to be happy. My son is now eighteen. He is officially an adult and embarking on many firsts. Learning to drive, finishing his first year in college, getting his first Summer job, figuring out who he is. I am learning to give him more freedom while still being there when it matters. My daughter is sixteen, and I can feel that same chapter approaching with her too. How our relationship is changing. I know from my own mum that it doesn’t matter what age your children are, the role of mother never stops. It changes.

When I started Creative Clay, I was chasing. Showcase every year, more shops, more stockists, more production. There was a fear underneath all of it. That my work was not good enough, that I was not good enough. I really did not know what I was doing. Just winging it basically, like we all are in a way. Thankfully, it worked, my business is still here and evolving. That fear has gone. I do not know exactly when it left, but it did.

Now I make things because I love making them. I live in the countryside in Co. Clare, surrounded by the things that end up in my work, like the fuchsia tumbling over the ditches, wild daisies all along the roadside, and the wildflowers of the beautiful Burren that has been there for millennia. Slow, intentional living, that is what my life looks like now, and I am grateful for it.

I have paired back from 25 stockists to just eight that I genuinely love working with. I sell directly through my website and at local events. I make each piece with more attention than I ever did when I was trying to make more of them. My work is better for it and I think I am better for it.

The weathered forms, the wildflowers pushing through limestone cracks, the ladybird hidden on every piece, these all still mean the same things to me. Fragility, resilience, and beauty, all finding a way through. That has not changed. If anything, I understand it more now that I have watched my own children begin to navigate the world, and my now 54 year old body needs more care and attention.

We all have our own battles. We pull out our inner wildflowers and do our best.

I still believe what I wrote in 2019. We get to live every day, we only die once. So make the days count as best you can, not easy in this new world full of distractions.

Make less, earn more! That sounds like a business strategy, but it is really just a way of staying sane. Less noise means more capacity to show up for the things that matter.

My work is changing too. The wildflowers are still there, not sure for how much longer as I find myself drawn now to what lies underneath. The dark, textured surfaces of the new pieces, the Containers, the Bud Vases, are about the interior landscape rather than the one outside the window. I have been interested in the unconscious my whole adult life, since stumbling on Jung as a student in the 1990s. The Undiscovered Self. It took me thirty years and a lot of living to find the courage to make work from that place. I think that is what this chapter is about.

— Raquel Walton · Sixmilebridge, Co. Clare