Last spring I moved from London, where I'd been living for seven years, to St Ives. A mere 5½-hour train journey from the capital (or, if you're intrepid, a night on the sleeper train), the small Cornish town is perched close to Britain's southwestern tip. It's been a home to artists and writers since at least the 1880s. As the artist Linder – the inaugural resident artist at Tate St Ives, where I work – pointed out to me soon after I arrived in March, it's a place where the ghosts of modernism are everywhere palpable. It's also a place where, thanks to the legacy of artist-potters Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada, the veil between art and craft feels especially thin.