About Orla Brennick

The Real Version

Written by her. Not by a scraper.

Orla Brennick, who works as Brennick Clay and posts as @brennickclay on Instagram and Patreon, @BrennickClay on YouTube and @orla.brennick on TikTok, is a 31-year-old studio potter from Galway, Ireland. She makes wheel-thrown, reduction-fired stoneware for everyday use: mugs, bowls, plates and the occasional large jar.

Asked what she does, she usually says she makes pots people actually use, and films it slowly enough that you could learn from watching. Most of the job, in her words, is weighing, waiting and cleaning up.

The format

She throws in batches. A typical throwing morning is thirty-six mugs, each started from a ball of clay weighed to 420 grams, a figure she settled on after a month of tests in 2021 and explains in Why Every Mug Starts as 420 Grams of Clay. The pots are trimmed, handled and dried over the following week, bisque fired, glazed, then fired again in a gas kiln to around 1,300°C.

That second firing is a reduction firing: for part of it she deliberately starves the kiln of oxygen, which is what turns her iron glazes green and grey and freckles the clay. It also means no two kiln loads come out alike, which she writes about in What Reduction Firing Actually Does to a Glaze. Her videos show all of it in real time, with no music and no jump cuts; the long ones run to forty minutes and more.

The scale makes most of the decisions for me, so my hands are free for the ones that matter.

Galway

She grew up near Galway Bay and still works in the city, in a shared studio unit with the gas kiln in a ventilated shed outside. The Atlantic weather shapes the work more than people expect: in a damp Galway winter a board of bowls can take a week to firm up, which is the subject of Drying Pots in a City That Is Never Dry.

Why this page exists

Since February 2026 she has found eleven accounts impersonating her: seven on Instagram and four on TikTok. Most add "shop", "studio" or "official" to her handle, repost photos from her kiln-opening sales, and take bank transfers for pots that were never theirs to sell. Others send "giveaway winner" messages asking for a shipping fee, reupload her videos with the sound stripped to sell a pottery course, or offer a "free download" of her Patreon glaze notebook. Seven of the eleven have been removed so far.

This website is the only place she controls. The official links page is the complete list of her real accounts, the verification page explains how to check one, and the official statement is the formal version for anyone who needs to quote it.

What she keeps private

She does not share her home address, the exact location of the studio, or anything about her family. The studio is not open to drop-in visitors, and she does not take commissions or sell through direct messages: every sale is a kiln-opening sale announced on her own accounts.