Over the last year a new way of making has emerged that has transformed my work and is now bearing fruit. I’ve just written about it for the about page of the website, but for those of you who follow my blog posts I thought I would share it on here….
about hands and clay
I love the everyday nature of clay. It’s the earth we walk on, the mud in our gardens, the bricks of our homes, our cups, plates, bowls, basins, baths and loos. It is a wonderfully ordinary material. But it is also extraordinary – the stuff of creation myths, soft enough to shape by hand, and hard enough once fired to hold those hand marks for millennia.
Hands have been shaping and firing clay pots for over 15,000 years, and vessels for utility, symbolism and ceremony have been central to the development of cultures all round the world. That’s millions of hands linked across time and space by the shared experience of making with clay. But making with clay is also an inner, personal, intimate experience – a silent conversation mediated through touch in a moment of creation. It is the joy of that conversation that drives me to make, and the desire for it to be as immediate and spontaneous as possible that has shaped the way I work.
Nature has always been the source of my creative vocabulary and each day I bring to the studio impressions, ideas and sometimes material from the morning’s walk and see where the conversation goes. Starting with a ball or cylinder of clay I expand it from the inside, breathing life into the form. I may have a shape in mind, but that is only a starting point as I respond to the feel and nature of the clay. Sometimes I wrap it in found materials which guide the shape and leave their mark on the surface. Sometimes I leave the surface free to fracture and fissure in response to my touch. Listening to the clay it might hint at the forms of ancient pots, or of the clay’s geological origins, or sometimes of something more animal and alive. And gradually, from this interplay of action and observation, intension and chance, maker and made, a vessel emerges that is both a continuation of an age-old human tradition and a unique product of the conversation between two hands and a ball of clay on a single day.
Have a look at the online gallery or, better still, visit my studio in the Cotswolds and hold the work in your own hands. Check the dates of the Saturday sales, or message me to make an appointment or fix live video viewing.
