[About]

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 combining 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.