When we’re younger and on the cusp of forging a career, we think we know exactly how it will pan out. We’re convinced that if we take the right steps, get the degree, and work hard, eventually we’ll end up in a stable job that we love — because when the high school careers advisor sat us down in that cramped office and interrogated us, we knew what we wanted out of life, right?

The path ahead was mapped out — every curve, every twist and turn planned for until we reached the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the rainbow that we were promised in classrooms and around the dinner table. No one warned us that the path could become dark and overgrown, that we might trip and lose our way, that the winds of change could uproot the signposting we had plotted so carefully, taking us in a different direction entirely. They also didn’t tell us that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

What if success isn’t measured by certainty and instead is quantified by the amount of courage it takes to reinvent yourself over and over again?

No one embodies this idea better than London-based ceramicist and multi-hyphenate creative, Jane Preston. From lacing up her pointe shoes as a ballet dancer to writing award-winning documentaries for the likes of Netflix, and most recently, steadily carving out a name as a ceramicist at the renowned Sarabande Foundation, established by the late Lee Alexander McQueen — Preston’s career is a testament to the power of embracing the change tomorrow brings, rather than resisting it. Each chapter of her story builds naturally on the last, and so far, it’s an extraordinary page-turner. Speaking over the phone with Preston in June, she took me back to the very beginning.

“It’s been quite a journey to get to doing ceramics, because I started as a dancer and an actress, and then when I got to twenty-seven, I had injuries. When I was younger, I actually wanted to attend art college, but growing up, you couldn’t go until you were eighteen. So it meant I could only go to ballet or theatre school at sixteen, and then I could move to London. I was a punk, and I just wanted to get to London, so I chose that route.”

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and usually the clues of how our lives have been shaped so far can be found in moments that at one point seemed ordinary. Threads of habit that felt fleeting were, in fact, integral to the tapestry of our lives.

“I had always loved art and creating because my father’s a master carpenter and a boat builder. I used to spend weekends with him. I don’t think he ever really knew what to do with a little girl, so I used to go into his workshop. I was making things out of wood and building stuff from when I was little. I’ve always liked the crafty side of creativity,” says Preston.

This seed of creativity, planted at an early age in her father’s workshop, began to flourish in new ways. Growing up in a socialist family, Preston recounts being deeply interested in politics. I imagined her as a child, ink-blotted thumb and finger, leafing through newspapers, yearning for stories beyond the borders of her Southampton hometown.

“I wanted to be a war correspondent, but because I’d left school at sixteen, I didn’t have any A-levels or a degree, so I couldn’t go to any of the journalism colleges to do that type of news reporting. I went to another college — it was called London College of Printing then; now it’s University of The Arts London — and so I did a postgrad degree in periodical journalism.”

Preston’s innate sensibility for storytelling snowballed into the palpable and heady energy of the 1990s and into the early 2000s, during which she began putting her degree to work writing the pop column for a large news outlet. It was a golden era when readers eagerly awaited the next issue of their favourite magazine and teenagers sat criss-cross applesauce on bedroom floors, devouring gossip-drenched pages. Stories felt sacred then. Sure, the internet sort of existed, but our relationship to it was different: if you wanted to know something, it was either printed or flickering across bulky television screens. As our taste for information evolved, Preston’s career followed suit, as she swapped print for television.

“I started doing development work for [UK broadcaster] Carlton. In my first week, I came up with a few ideas, and a couple got commissioned, which is quite unheard of. They asked me, ‘How do you come up with ideas so quickly?’ and I said, ‘Because I’m a journalist.’ Then I pitched a documentary about the Bay City Rollers to Channel 4, and they said, ‘Great, we’ll do it. You can make it.’ I remember thinking, ‘But I don’t know anything about television!’ It was a baptism of fire. I made the film, it did well, and from there I started directing television documentaries.”

Creativity is strange in that it almost feels like a physical companion, at once separate from us, yet living within us. It’s like a relationship, one that ebbs and flows. But like any relationship, the biggest instigator of change is time, and for Preston, it became evident that her union with television had evolved and was no longer quite the same.

“Back then, when you made a film, you had time. Time to plan. You had a good schedule, you had time to film everything, and then there was a period between filming and going into the edit where you could do a paper edit and work out what you wanted the film to be. As time went on, that started to change more and more. Schedules got shorter, and there was no crew.” She continues, “The last thing that sealed my fate: I wrote a series about the nineties. I wrote the series because I was around in the nineties. So how everything changed culturally, I was in amongst it. It was very good, but it ended up being reduced to a famous person’s clip show. They took all that out and started putting people like Kim Kardashian in it, just to get the clickbait.” Preston adds, “Creatively, it’s incredibly demoralising. During the process, I was working seven days a week, fifteen hours a day, having panic attacks in the middle of the night because of the schedule. If you can’t do your best work, you’re not getting anything back creatively.”

As Preston realised the chapter she had spent decades writing was drawing to a close, life quietly turned the page for her.

“A friend of mine, who’s into the arts, said, ‘Come and do a ceramics workshop.’ So I went and did this workshop where you coiled, you learnt to hand-build. You roll out coils and then build them up to make the sculpture. People would ask, ‘Where did you go to art college? How long have you been doing ceramics?’ and I’d say, ‘Well, I’ve never actually touched clay before.’ I just took to it like a duck to water. I loved it.”

From experimenting with clay at the kitchen table to attending drop-in classes at Heatherleys School of Fine Art, Preston continued to refine her craft — teaching herself various techniques and how to create from a place of freedom, intuition, and vulnerability.

“I don’t really sketch anything out in advance; it’s quite intuitive. When you’re doing it, you’re working through the pain and pleasure of life. It’s almost quite therapeutic, in the sense that your emotions come out through the clay.”

Given that Preston had spent much of her life telling stories and exploring the complexities of the human experience through writing and filmmaking, I was curious as to whether that same creative sensibility had naturally carried over into her ceramic practice.

“It’s almost like a journey of going from being a dancer to a journalist, to a filmmaker. All of those industries, all of that creative narrative storytelling, one way or another — whether it’s filmed, whether it’s audio, whether it’s print — it’s a creativity that I feel that has come into my ceramics. It’s another creative expression.”

As Preston continued to explore the medium, every tomorrow brought new opportunities, people, and ways to create. Today, she is a resident artist at the Sarabande Foundation, established by the late designer Lee Alexander McQueen. The residency application is a rigorous one, yet Preston approached the process without expectation or agenda, solely driven by the longing for a space to continue nurturing her practice.

“I did the application for Sarabande, and I got an interview. I was like oh my fucking god!” Preston continues, “Trino [Verkade], who’s the director here, she was saying, ‘You brought in so much stuff, it’s like ten different artists’ work, where’s your narrative? Where’s your story?’ She gave me really good advice on how to create a narrative collection. Then Trino said, ‘So how long have you been doing ceramics?’ Because obviously I’m not twenty-one! I went, ‘Oh nearly a year, I suppose, at home.’ She said, ‘maybe you should apply next year’. So I thought to myself, she likes my work, she said apply next year, I got good advice — I was happy with that,” says Preston.

Rejecting the uncertain is a hallmark trait of the human experience. We all share the tendency to crane our necks towards the future, clenching with iron fists and dogmatic certainty. It’s easier that way, to know what’s coming around the corner, so we can protect ourselves from whatever grisly experiences might be hurtling towards us. However, there’s a lot to be said for trusting that what’s meant for you won’t pass you by. The more we spoke, the more it seemed that ceramics had found Preston as much as she had found it.

“I thought, ‘Oh no, never in a million years.’ So I went on holiday to Kefalonia with my son, and weeks later I’d completely forgotten about the application. I’d put it out of my mind. When Sarabande said yes, I just went, ‘Oh no… oh my god!’ I burst into tears, then started laughing my head off. I thought that’s it, I’m done with TV, and this is my tomorrow.”

The unknown often means stepping outside your comfort zone, pulling up a seat at the table, and reminding yourself that your place there is earned. I wanted to know more about Sarabande and how the residency has continued to nurture and shape the path ahead.

“Having this year here at Sarabande, they give you a studio, support with mentoring, marketing, lectures, and practicals. We do studio walk-throughs. I’ve had Givenchy come around, Gucci, The Tate — all the big galleries come to see people’s work. It gives you access to these people who never in a million years would talk to me if I were sitting at home at the kitchen table.”

Preston adds, “When you’re talking about your work, you’re talking about yourself. So when somebody asks you about your practice, you have to say something about it. It’s actually quite hard, because you’ve got to sell yourself a bit. Again, you feel like you’re growing, you have to say it out loud: this is me, this is what I do, and this is why I do it. And I’m here now.”

Society has a habit of defining success through age-appropriate milestones, bashing us over the head with the idea that by the time we turn a certain age, we should have dotted every ‘i’ and crossed every ‘t’. However, I believe that leaving the familiar behind in search of the one thing that fills your soul to bursting is one of the bravest acts of self-love and self-determination one can make. As we spoke, what stuck out to me was Preston’s courage to throw caution to the wind, feel the fear, and do it anyway.

“I remember my grandmother saying to me when I was really young, ‘Darling, don’t ever end up being an if only person.’ So even if things don’t work out, I’ve always gone for it. So it is starting again, I feel like I’m forty years younger, I feel like I’m at the beginning again. Each time you feel like you’re at the beginning again, but you want to go on a journey because otherwise what’s the fucking point of life if you’re not continually growing. When you stop thinking you’re growing or learning something, that’s when the rot sets in.” Preston continues, “I have to get three trains each way to get to the studio. I skip in the morning, I’m here early — I’ll do anything because every single moment is like a blessing and a joy. That to me is what starting again has been like; it’s invigorating.”

These days, culture rewards speed, but the most meaningful work has always asked the opposite of us. Creating something tangible and enduring requires presence, resilience, and discomfort — inviting us to inhabit time instead of yearning for more of it.

Preston explains, “Making something is a process. It’s a storytelling process because there’s a beginning, a middle, and an end, and then there’s what people think of it. That process applies to most creative things, but the fact that you’re using your hands to make something enduring, one of my pieces could last for thousands of years.” She continues, “They’re clay, they’re from the earth, and there’s something quite grounding about that — there’s something rather magical as a human being having an intersection with the planet. The clay comes from the ground, then it passes to you as a human, then you do something with it that’s permanent. It connects humanity with nature. I didn’t intend to have that feeling, but that’s what I’ve started noticing — the presence you feel with it.”

If you’ve got this far, you’re probably aware by now that the theme of Ode issue three is ‘tomorrow’, so, to conclude our conversation, I wanted to know what tomorrow meant to Preston.

“For the first time in a very long time, I’m excited about the possibilities of tomorrow and motivated by how I can influence what my tomorrow is going to be. I’ve chosen to want to have a tomorrow that is creatively fulfilling, because it makes me a better person to the people that I love and to the world. I think if you’ve got a joyous soul, only good can come out of that.”

Someone famous once said somewhere, “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.”

It turns out Jane Preston isn’t just inspiring and brave, but funny too.