[About]

Primitive creativity, digital craft

My ceramics are a commentary on the times we live in, synthesising primitive creativity, craft and digital processes together.

Before ceramics grabbed me and brought me to St Ives a decade ago, my background was in business strategy. In 2008, I established my own consultancy in digital business design.

I’ve always been fascinated by culture and how we have always created the world we live in through the things we make. As an artist, I’m interested in themes of origin and culture, identity and heritage. I like to explore the intersection between innovation and tradition, things that are momentary and things that last.

Technology has had an influence on me from the moment I was given the task of launching the Apple Macintosh in the UK in 1984 as a young advertising executive in London. There were 23 years before that when life was completely analogue.

I think what we are witnessing now is the birth of digitally-empowered human civilization. I see this chapter in human evolution - as we transition from the industrial age to a time shaped by automation and artificial intelligence - as an epochal shift that warrants a narrative.

Writing this in early 2024, we are living with artificial intelligence as a force equal or superior to ourselves. It’s the first time in history we’ve co-exited with anything that challenges human capability, and there are unknown consequences.

For me, all this comes with a caution. It is vital not to abandon the wisdom of the past - our authentic intelligences - and the benefits and freedom we’ve created for ourselves through purely human agency. These things have stood the test of time, while the digital world can be erased in an instant.

The question of what and who we want to be as digital humans is an ongoing thought behind what I make. I honour this thought by using clay as a sustainable medium of the earth that has been reliably built to last throughout civilization.

The role of the individual in society, iconography and encoding are a particular focus of my [Alter Piece] figures, while with the thrown pieces I tend to focus on origin themes, callouts about the preservation of human autonomy and the value of retaining independent action.

I make a combination of slipcast figures and pieces thrown on the wheel in a variety of clay bodies, including earthenware, stoneware and high-fired terracotta.

The main material I use is Leach stoneware, which comes from a traditional clay pit in St Agnes’ Head in Cornwall. Bernard Leach used to refer to processed and packaged clays as ‘paste’, somewhat witheringly. St Agnes’ clay has a beautiful, magnificent, elemental quality.

I’ve been working with clay for over a decade but, despite having been interested in the arts all my life, ceramics wasn't my first creative pursuit. That was fashion design, which I studied as a second degree at St Martin’s School of Art.

Several years later, I saw someone cutting out a piece of slab-rolled clay and the realisation hit me hard - ‘why haven’t I worked with clay as a material before?’

From that point, ceramics became my passion.

It’s important to me to showcase the wonderful raw properties of clay as a profoundly natural material. I part-glaze my pieces so that the unvarnished state of the clay can be clearly seen and enjoyed.

I draw upon and pay homage to the ancient provenance of ceramic practice by using traditional materials and methods and combine them with contemporary skills and techniques. This is at the heart of everything I do.

As well as referencing digital iconography as a common theme, the Alter Pieces I make were designed using 3d ceramic printing techniques and I use digital processing to make the decorative transfers that are applied to my ceramics.

For me, working with digital tools and materials only has value if it builds upon the wisdom of the ancients, rather than displacing or replacing it.

It is said that ‘history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme’.

That thought is pivotal to my approach.

For more information, please get in touch.

Read about another project - thoughts about the emergence of digital civilization here.