“I want my furniture to look like that.”

It was the coldest, bleakest part of this last winter. That was when my right arm was gripped with such intense pain that I had to stop working with the clay. I was not happy! The medical advice was to take a break for a month, but what was I going to do?  It turned out that this was an opportunity to completely rethink my making process. 

All my forms up to this point had been made by honing them into shape using a metal scraper held in my right hand, and it was the tension in doing that that had led to the pain. I loved that process, and I felt that the gradual refinement of the firms over many days was part of what people perceived in them. I thought that, in some way, it was the source of their calmness and what they communicated. So to be deprived of access to that process was a challenge to what I had come to believe the work was about.

But my commitment is not to the outcome of the making process, it is to the process itself – to try to find a rightness in the making process and see what that quality leads to in the finished pieces. Clearly the scraping that I enjoyed was not right for my arm, so could there be a new way of making that would involve less tension and more balance in my body? 

For some reason I had also been reflecting on my early days of recording wildlife sounds which eventually led to my first career in natural history radio. Thinking back to the child who stuck a microphone out of his bedroom window to record the garden bird song I realised how long I have had a fascination with recording the natural world in one way or another. I was thinking how clay also keeps a record of everything that happens to it until it is fired, at which point the story of its making is locked into its form and surface. Maybe thinking of the clay as a recording medium could lead to a new way of working.  And so it did. 

When I was first training as a furniture maker I saw a print on a friend’s wall.  It was a painting of a dark headland on the horizon of a grey-green sea.  I want my furniture to look like that – I thought.  Which seemed strange, because there was nothing furniture-like about the image..

…but the painting had some quality that I wanted to find in my own work – a simplicity, a strength, a serenity.

When I saw that painting some 5 years ago I didn’t know John-Knapp Fisher and I hadn’t been to Pembrokeshire since I was a child.  Now I live here, my work is inspired by the same coastal landscape that John painted for years and, to my delight I now know John and he commissioned from me a small, dovetailed oak chest.This piece now sits in his room beneath the original of that very painting, Headland 1972.  What an extraordinary coincidence, and what a pleasure it was to tell John that story.  You can see more photos of the chest on the gallery page of this site.

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