Location: Molong
Offers: Weekly pottery classes and gallery shop
See this venue on the HANDMADE Map
We spoke to: Owner and teacher Jude Keogh
When Jude was made redundant at her full-time job as a media photographer, this challenge brought her an opportunity to pursue her other creative passion: pottery. Without being forced by circumstance, Jude admits that her Earth & Fire Studio in Molong might never have taken shape in the way that it has, but she’s certainly glad now for the way things have gone. Just six months since opening, Earth & Fire Studio is going strong, meeting a preexisting demand for pottery classes in the area.
‘I’m lucky that I have very little competition,’ Jude says modestly, and it’s true that no one else in the Orange area is providing regular pottery making classes, as she does 4-5 times a week. But Jude has also done a lot of work to promote her classes and make the studio a success. Each of these classes serves a maximum of eight students, including a beginner’s class every Saturday and more intensive multi-day or multi-week courses for ongoing ‘dabblers’, and they’ve been consistently well-attended, if not sold out.
In front of her workshop space, Jude also has a small gallery shop where she sells her own ceramic works and photography pieces, as well as clay to her students and other potters. Earth & Fire’s success so far can be attributed partly to this diversity in its income streams, which can be crucial to small business, and Jude even offers a paid firing service from her studio kiln. Not stopping there, her next goal is to expand her e-commerce operation so that she can sell more of her ceramics online, but she concedes that these things take time, and she’s in no hurry to expand any quicker than she can manage.
Most of Jude’s students are coming to her from the Orange region and the Central West more broadly, but in her Saturday classes she sees some people from much further afield, too, a lot of whom stay at SONA, the luxury accommodation next door. Along with the social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram that are now essential for promotion, Jude has made good use of real community connections to establish her presence and goodwill in town, donating her ceramic works to local charity events and cross-promoting with the café next to her home. With the intention to position herself more firmly within the region’s tourism ecosystem going forward, Jude will also be holding a five-day pottery course during the Orange Fire Festival in August this year. It’s this kind of multi-faceted promotion that can build sustainability into a small business.
For advice on getting things going, and ironing out operational kinks, Jude has made the most of free resources like Central West Business HQ, which offers 20 hours of business consultation to start-ups, and various seminars on the Create NSW website. Online networks like the Australian Tourism Data Warehouse (ATDW) and more locally, Orange 360, are also invaluable assets.
But it’s all too clear that for Jude, Earth & Fire Studio is much more than just a business or day job, but a place to bring people together and share her passion. ‘Pottery teaches you a lot about life,’ she says, ‘about failure and having another go, and finding joy in that. It’s a really important thing to provide people that opportunity, to get an escape from work and the day-to-day. Creativity rounds out your life, it opens up the mind.’
Three tips we got from Jude:
- Diversify the income streams from your business, in ways that fit naturally together.
- Engage with the community around you as well as broader regional networks.
- Make the most of any free business advice you can find; it is there to be used.
More info:
https://www.earthandfirestudio.com.au
Five Day Workshop in August 2025
Works for sale at the Corner Store Gallery, Orange
