Little beats the age-old alchemy that takes what is essentially earth and transforms it into a useful and beautiful object. I make one-off and small batch ceramics in my studio in Kentish Town, London. I work with white earthenware and stoneware to create hand built pieces. Most are impressed with plants I have gathered from the garden and hedgerows at Tŷ Llwyd in Wales and then hand-coloured with oxides or underglaze. The pieces are bisque-fired; glazed with transparent glossy or matte glazes; and finished with a glaze firing.
Since childhood, I have immersed myself in the decorative arts and been especially fascinated by the Arts and Crafts movement, and Persian painting, craft and pottery. I later studied art history at The Courtauld Institute. I have painted miniatures inspired by Mughal painting as well as large abstract paintings using calligraphy and I have explored printmaking through both etching and linocut.
There is nothing more intriguing to me then the moment of lifting a flower or seed head pressed into a piece of smooth, damp clay and revealing the intricate and often startling impression left behind. I have long been fascinated by the detail of plant forms: the veins in a gossamer fine petal; the slender ribs dividing and branching over leaves; or the spiky tracery from a parched seed head.
Clay, in its soft, ‘green’ state, can capture these unique botanical fingerprints so beautifully and then preserve them on its hard, glassy surface once it is fired and glazed. For me there is an intuitive progression in taking the plants I have applied to my ceramic surfaces and, in their now pressed state, re-using them to make collagraph plates which are inked up and run through a small table-top etching press to create prints on paper. There is an equivalent thrill when peeling damp, heavy paper away from its plate and seeing the impression embossed onto its surface under the weight of the press. The resulting prints retain the remarkable detail of the botanical impressions in clay, but in a two-dimensional medium.
