Working with clay is like a conversation with a good friend. It’s about openness, listening and spontaneous exploration.  The pleasure is in being together. The pot is a physical manifestation of that meeting.

Nature and landscape are and always have been my love and the source of my creative vocabulary. So each day I bring to the studio impressions, ideas and sometimes material from the morning’s walk and see which way the conversation goes that day.  

I am neither following a specific tradition nor aiming for the work to be original or different from other contemporary work.  Instead, each piece is a personal exploration of the nature of the material in my hands and my physical intuition in the moment of making.  It is as if there were a wordless question that is re-asked and re-answered with each piece. There is no one answer and each pot seems to answer in a different way, but the joy of making is the joy of asking the question.

Keeping the materials and techniques as simple as possible seems best in this exploration. So I start with a ball or cylinder of clay and use my hands to expand the pot from the inside, creating volume and breathing life into the vessel.  Sometimes the clay is wrapped with found materials which bring a third voice to the conversation and leave their mark on the surface. Sometimes the surface is left simply to tell the story of how the vessel came into being.  

Once the piece is made I use oxides, slips and glazes to enhance the surface and highlight what is already there. I love the immediacy and fluidity of this process and the surprise I often feel at  what emerges.

You can unearth the shards of my past making life – radio, TV, paintings, and furniture – in the blog and elsewhere online, but it is clay that draws me and seems best suited to the conversations that matter to me now. 

Thanks for your interest. You can see the latest pieces in the gallery, or better still, come and see them in the flesh at my open studios, or message me to fix a visit or a personal online viewing.