hands, clay and nature
It’s amazing to think that human hands have been shaping and firing clay for over 15,000 years, so when I pick up a ball of clay in the studio I am linked to millions of other makers, across time and space, through this shared tactile experience. But making with clay is also an inner, intimate experience – a silent conversation with the clay in a moment of creation. It is the joy of that conversation that drives me to make, and the desire for the conversation to be free and spontaneous that shapes the way I work.
Nature has always been the source of my creativity and each day I come to the studio with 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. I may have a shape in mind, but that is only a starting point as I respond to the feel 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.
As well as being inspired by nature it’s also important to me that the work is respectful of nature. So over time I have moved away from high fired, energy-intensive glazed work to low temperature, single fired, earthenware vessels with surfaces enhanced with earth pigments and beeswax. The result is a more sustainable aesthetic that acknowledges our place in the natural world and celebrates the living, breathing nature of simple fired clay.
The arc of my creative life, from journalism and broadcasting through furniture making and now ceramics has been been one of gradually loosening control and embracing happenstance. A shift from imposing “my” creativity to embracing the creative nature of existence. That for me is the source of joy, surprise and endless variety in this work.
brief bio
My early career with the BBC ranged from radio sound engineer to World Service science and environment journalist and editor of radio at the Natural History Unit, winning the British Association of Science Writers radio award in 1989 and 1998 and a British Environment and Media Award in 2002. In 2000 I also wrote for and directed Sir David Attenborough in the TV film about the animal origins of human music, The Song of the Earth, before combining presentation and production roles across a range of natural history radio output.
In 2009 I retrained and established a business designing and making fine furniture, including the Arts Council of Wales-funded Land, Sea and Light collection inspired by the Pembrokeshire coastal landscape, but over time I was drawn to ceramics and opened my current Cotswold studio in 2022.
An early large-scale sculptural piece, Ecos, is permanently installed at the public Nature in Art Gallery in Twigworth, Gloucestershire, but I now concentrate on smaller scale, low-fire, environment-sensitive pieces with a visual vocabulary drawn from my many years observation of nature and focusing on the spontaneous interaction of maker, material and the natural world expressed through the form and surface of the earthenware vessels.