Welcome
Welcome to my portfolio. Here you’ll find a selection of my current work. I am only just starting out as a practitioner and have spent 2024 setting up a workshop space in my garage. I am experimenting with various clays including terracotta, a professional black stoneware and a white earthenware and am particularly interested in surface pattern. My work is hand built with impressed, incised and relief decoration working with found and collected objects, junk, old wooden printing blocks and trinkets. Initially the surface was kept plain, no colour, or glaze as I was pre-occupied with creating different banded patterns. But, I soon realised that adding coloured bands enhanced the cylindrical forms and so I began to experiment with different coloured slips and velvet underglazes.
Ceramic Portfolio and Working Practice
At the very beginning...
I have a wonderful collection of old wooden letter stamps all of various sizes and fonts and initially I began to experiment by impressing them into slabs of terracotta in different combinations to make interesting bands. Once leather hard I started to form cylinders with different sized foot rings and then later adding a neck ring too. My thoughts were to be able to stack the forms one on top of the other, and to be interchangeable.
Developmental stage no.2
Stage 2 was to combine patterns using the wooden letters stamps, alongside found objects that would create different sized dashes, dots, circles and pierced holes. At this stage I began working predominantly with the black clay and investigating ways to apply the velvet underglaze colours. The pattern became a rhythm, repetition of dots, dashes and circles.
I have a small enamelling kiln, curtesy of my dad, with no prior understanding of how to use it. So, I started to research the process, learning the basics of how to clean the copper discs and how to fire the enamelling kiln. I had much success, and made a dozen oval discs with various opaque and transparent coloured enamels. I found the outcomes extremely interesting so much so that I wanted to incorporate them on the banded patterns to add a touch of colour, a talisman, a jewel. I was experimenting and came across a jar of tiny copper studs and decided to see if I could enamel these in the same way. After figuring out how to keep them stood upright, making a special trivet I then began to to fire them, testing a wide range of colours, orange, red, black, green. I had to modify the holes within the ceramic forms to ensure a snug fit, but once I'd done this I was delighted with the appearance and the impact these had on the forms.
Link to observational drawings / trees research - see the drawing section
I can see now a clear link to the work that I was doing during COVID. The fascination I had with the various types of trees close to where I live, in particular the different types of bark, the banded patterns, the different colours, the textures and the knots / eyes.
May 2025: I have been very busy over the last few months beavering away in my studio making a selection of work in readiness for participations in the upcoming Ceramic Fair at The Hepworth Wakefield (@hepworthwakefield)
in June. I have been experimenting with different surface colours including mauve, black and orange as well as continuing to expand my enamelling onto copper discs technique and discovering new colours including lime green, mauve and yellow.
These forms can be stacked in different combinations, see below some photographs of the different collections of work.
