Where land meets sky, river touches earth and trees scatter their presence across undulating hills, there seems no end to the inspiration that feeds my Layered Landscape Vessels /

Geology, rock formations and the mineral language of the earth have fascinated me since childhood. I remember foraging for fossils at Severn Beach with my father; now, I walk regularly across the Mendip Hills near my studio, continually observing the shifting colours, textures and formations of the landscape /

My earliest landscape vessel was influenced by the work of Ewen Henderson, whom I was fortunate to interview while studying for my BA (Hons) Ceramics. His own relationship with landscape, and the freedom he found through hand-building, introduced me to ideas of memory, invention and metaphor that continue to resonate within my practice /

My memory of landscape is not purely visual, but visceral and energetic. The feelings and sensations that arise as I walk and explore become absorbed into my experience and later resurface through making. I begin each vessel on the potter’s wheel, enjoying the grounding rhythm and centrifugal force of throwing, before allowing chance and intuition to intervene as I build upwards with coils of contrasting clays. Layers accumulate, shift and fracture; fissures, folds and convolutions become traces of remembered terrain, while colour and texture evoke something of the landscapes held within me /

Some vessels are reduction fired in a gas kiln, enriching the depth and movement of their slips and glazes; others are barrel fired outdoors, allowing flame, smoke and atmosphere to leave their own unpredictable traces upon the surface. Each Layered Landscape Vessel is singular: an accumulation of earth, memory, material and place /