What This Page Is
Only the things that can be documented
Everything below is either a date I can point at or a thing you can go and look at yourself. There is no origin story here and no round numbers that got rounded in a flattering direction. Where a date is approximate, it says so.
It starts with one evening class in 2019. That is the honest shape of it.
I took a ten-week beginners' evening class at a community studio in Galway. By week four I was staying late to use the wheels. The class is the only formal training I have had.
My first post was a lopsided bowl from that class, and it is still on the account. Instagram records the date the account was made; it is on the About This Account panel.
I moved into a shared studio unit on the edge of the city, with a gas kiln in a ventilated shed outside, and fired my first reduction load. That autumn I also spent a month testing mug weights and settled on 420 grams, which I wrote about in Why Every Mug Starts as 420 Grams of Clay.
brennickclay was already registered on TikTok by someone else, so I joined as orla.brennick. That mismatch matters later; the verify page explains why.
My first full-length video on YouTube, @BrennickClay: forty-one minutes of twelve mugs thrown in real time, no music and no cuts. It is still up, and it set the format for everything since.
Patreon started as a home for my firing logs and glaze notebook.
I sold a full kiln load for the first time, announced on my own accounts a week ahead, with patrons getting first pick. Every sale since has worked the same way, and none has ever been run through DMs.
I was sent a screenshot of an account called Brennick Clay Shop taking bank transfers for my pots. Since then I have found eleven fakes, seven on Instagram and four on TikTok. Seven have been removed so far.
1 September 2026. One place I control, with the full list of my real accounts on the official links page.
Sources
Where these dates come from
Account creation dates are the ones the platforms themselves record. Video and post dates are from the posts themselves, which are public and still up. The impersonation counts are from my own reports to the platforms.
There is nothing on this page sourced from an aggregator, a "biography" site, or a stats service, because I can't check those and neither can you. If something here is wrong, it's wrong because I got it wrong, and I'll fix it.