Clay is a notoriously stubborn, labour-intensive and unforgiving material. Embracing these properties, I create ceramic vessels and sculptures marked by my tactile experience of sculpting the clay with my hands. The audience encounters the physical as well as visual: Finger imprints, throwing rings, join lines and scoring, emphasising the artist’s hand in the creation of each piece. I avoid placing a narrative on the work. Instead, the markings narrate the self-contained personal histories in the clay body of each vessel. Inspired by the installations of Edmund de Waal, I work intuitively to place and assemble groupings of objects; some clustered together, others decidedly separate. Inhabiting the space in this way, the work questions the autonomy of the unique handcrafted object and the aesthetic force within a series of related forms.
My creative process is very experimental, driven by my aesthetic preferences and knowledge of the material language of clay. My primary instinct is to hand-build, creating a mixture of functional and sculptural ceramics, sometimes a blend of the two. I try to create a sense of balance in my work, at times manipulating the clay into intricate 3D forms while, at others, working freely and spontaneously guided by the material tendencies of the clay. This back-and-forth relationship between maker and material is central to my creative process. I’m particularly interested in the struggle between the desires of the two and my work seeks to create a balance between them.