All my art is built by hand.  I never use moulds or casts.  To me, beauty lies in the undulations. 

With sculptural ceramics, the journey from concept to actuality is often long and requires a patient touch.  

Before I even handle the clay, I prepare materials that I will wedge into it to add depth, texture and strength.

I then throw down and 'stitch' together slabs of clay that I will roll to create my solid clay panels and structures that become a canvas to my painterly leanings.  I use oxides and stains to build colours and then work them into washes and hydrous suspensions of clay, which I layer on the body of the pieces to create different hues and tonal shifts.  

My work is generally highly textured and much time is spent building up layers, etching, carving, inlaying… continually building, deconstructing and reclaiming form and surface, encouraging fragmentation and fluctuations, interspersed by multiple firings.  

I love working with a substance that is almost alive.  You walk away from it and when you return, it will have altered and even if that change is imperceptible at times, it is real.  The clay will dictate as much to you as you to it, so having an instinctive understanding of it’s cycles and rhythms is part of the artform.  Your hands read the clay.  They tell you when to intervene and adjust the conditions as it cures but also to know when the window has opened for the next process to begin and equally, when that window has closed. 

You are in constant dialogue with the clay as it goes through it’s slow and critical dehydration and great care and much time is spent caretaking each work to ensure it dries evenly to minimise the risk of fracturing and explosions in the kiln. 

A small piece of clay, cut, built or thrown with uniformity will essentially exhibit predictable and stable behaviour.  While any deviation from this conformity provokes instability, my works are almost entirely made of solid clay and are both large in scale and flat in dimension - the trinity of factors that promote cracking.  I further exacerbate these vulnerabilities by increasing each piece’s nuance, building layers, varying the depth of it’s constituent parts, introducing different clay bodies and incorporating joins as the work progresses - challenging it, pushing it and sometimes even forcing it just beyond it’s limits, to elicit a fracture without destroying the work. 

Each firing is a 2 day cycle and each work is fired at least twice, at temperatures of up to 1300 degrees celcius.  Once fired, a number of my pieces involve intricate assembly. 

Alongside my works, I am continuously prototyping glazes - logging my materials, processes and conditions for each.  Where the glaze is fired in the kiln, the underlying clay body of the work, the thickness of the glaze batch, how the glaze is applied to a piece and numerous other factors all send the final result on various tangents. I then incorporate these glazes into much of my artwork during the glaze fire.

Whilst the foundation of my sculptural work is always clay, I often incorporate other mediums in the development of texture.  I file wrought iron, knot jute, hand-dye, tear and stitch cotton, linen and silks.

Each finished work is a marriage of creative flow and the culmination of the building of processes, techniques and materials layered, coloured, fired, brushed, painted and dipped to create a harmony from the many parts, culminating in the realisation of the original vision.