My practice asks how a ceramic vessel might hold not only the material traces of a landscape and the biodiversity of plant life, but something of the forces through which living things grow, orient and become. Working between vessel and sculpture, I use clay as both my material conduit and record of an encounter with place /

This enquiry deepened through my MFA research, when I began making Earth Vessels on location using wild and commercial clays with organic matter gathered from the surrounding landscape. Rather than representing a place, these works brought the landscape physically into the vessel and established an ongoing interest in clay as an embodied, relational material /

Since then, the boundary of the vessel has become increasingly unstable as my curiosity into the ‘unseen forces’ of nature grows. Thrown and re-formed stoneware bodies carry wild-clay slips, organic impressions and melting engobes; while porcelain extends beyond the rim into fragile fronds, branches and root-like structures. I am interested in the moment when a vessel stops simply containing, and begins to behave more like a living system — reaching outward, connecting, diverging and adapting to it’s surroundings /

My current work considers what I think of as growing intention: the directional impulse through which trees and plants reach towards light, water, gravity and one another. Rather than describing trees literally, I translate this sense of reaching and becoming through line, repetition, balance, fragility and movement /

Increasingly, the kiln itself participates in this enquiry. Heat, gravity, flux and the material memory of clay are allowed to act upon the work, causing porcelain to soften, slump, fuse or shift. I establish the conditions, but resist total control, allowing firing to become a collaboration between artistic intention and material agency /

Wild clay keeps these experiments rooted in actual landscape, while I play with the tensions between containment and growth, control and surrender, permanence and fragility. The resulting vessel, bearing individual form with echoes of the wider living systems to which it belongs /

I want these vessels to feel as though they are caught in the act of becoming: holding traces of where they came from, while simultaneously reaching beyond themselves /