About My Work
Hand Thrown
It is of great importance to my practice that every piece I make is an individually made, unique, one-of-a-kind treasure. Therefore, each form is thrown on the potter's wheel, turned, and hand decorated.
Hand decorated
I explore highly decorated surfaces using a process called slip trailing to build up spherical patterns on sculptural forms. Slip is a mixture of clay and water, and at the right consistency it can be piped like icing using slip trailer tool. The slip dots add a textured element to the surface, which extends the art form from just a visual experience.
Each pattern is applied freehand, with individually piped dots.
Glazed
In recent years, my passion for glaze chemistry has grown hugely. I test and develop hundreds of recipes using raw materials, finding glazes that suit my subtle textured surfaces.
It’s a fine balance to find glazes rich in colour, but accentuate the dotted surfaces which I spend hours decorating.
Gold
I often finish my pieces with gold lustre, which I hand paint onto the glazed surfaces and fire a third time to around 800°C. Gold lustre is real 24 ct gold metal suspended in a medium, which burns out in the kiln and leaves the gold behind to bond with the surface.
Miniature
I consider my work small-scale and miniature, working with a scale between around one centimetre and twenty centimetres high. Even on the smallest forms, I exploit the tiny surface as much as I can with dense decoration.
Full Scale
I also work on larger pieces, always pushing the boundaries. There’s a very small window where I can decorate a piece with slip dots successfully before the clay becomes too dry, so working larger can have it’s challenges. Working on a large form can take days, and just like my miniatures, I pay attention to every part of the surface.