I have been an editor, a musician, a newspaper-quiz-writer and, in the previous incarnation of this Etsy shop, a concocter of lotions and potions. For the past three years I have been painting, drawing, sculpting and sometimes exhibiting. My current work has a focus on ceramics but the mediums I use evolve and change.

Clay Flutes
Three years ago I had an overpowering urge to make clay flutes. It was all-consuming and illogical - I hadn't touched clay since an early highschool ceramics class, and I hadn't enjoyed the feel of it in my hands at all. I had an honours degree in music and had been a flautist for decades, but the clay flutes I envisaged making had little resemblance to the mechanical, perfectly metallic and machine-refined flutes I was used to playing in the context of my music career.

I bought some cheap school-grade clay from a local art shop and after months of making, squashing and breaking all the hideously ugly objects that formed in my hands, I wasn't exactly heartened by my progress. No flutes had emerged. I had no kiln and was firing pieces in the Coonara (a woodfired heater) in my loungeroom. They usually exploded.

I made hundreds and hundreds of hand-formed pinch-pots trying to understand the clay - its plasticity, its weight and waxiness, its fragility. But it wasn't until a little electric kiln came into my life that I started to make any progress.

I did make some clay flutes and I still do make them from time to time, but I found that tiny vessels, beads and other small works formed in my hands most often. I started experimenting with porcelain and I found it challenging and temperamental but the pieces came out looking like teeth and bones and shells and stones, and fresh from the kiln, still too warm to touch, they smelled dangerous and exciting.

Tooth and bone, shell and stone. That is porcelain, both poetically and literally. All of the natural minerals that comprise porcelain are the result of refinement by aeons of time, whittled away by natural erosion. I make a lot of beads that look like teeth and bones and shell and stones and it can feel like a phoenix rising from its own ashes – my hands reconstitute and reconstruct the very elements that have been worn away.

It has taken time to see themes emerging in my work but I always come back to archaeology, erosion, smallness - and how these relate to the human condition.

I think our hands have memory. As my work comes to form from pieces of clay in my hands, images of birch canoes, silent across glacial water, move across the screen of my mind. As I smooth, sand and sculpt the clay, I remember stone hand axes, double ended, and clapsticks, and ceremonies for rain and fire. Somehow I feel these memories as my own lived experience. It is as if my hands become the key to an ancestral memory-ground buried somewhere in my cells and bones - in all of our cells and bones.
Maybe it's a form of instinct, or intuition, a collective archive of the human experience - all I know is that the feeling of clay and earth in my hands gives me access to it.

My Work Process

All of my ceramic work happens this way: I take a piece of wet clay in my hands, and a solid object emerges - quick, gestural, rough and raw, usually with only a tiny hint of its final form. After it is dry, I carve, cut and whittle away at the form, taking off a piece here and a piece there until it feels right. It's more like woodworking, flint-knapping or stone carving than ceramics. I don't know why I work this way, but I sometimes wonder if it has to do with my hands remembering a time before the first fires and the first clay - my hands recall finding stones more easily than they do sculpting wet clay. So I first create stonelike would-be 'found objects' and begin my sculpting process from there.

Then the real work begins. I sand and smooth and brush and sponge until the piece is smooth and refined as bone. Mountains of porcelain dust build up. It is repetitive, dirty, muscle-tiring work - and oddly meditative. I find it calming and I hope that that calm is transmitted somehow in the finished piece.

Then I fire the pieces in an electric kiln to 1060 degrees celcius. When they come out of the kiln they are chalky and brittle. At this stage I see if they need more sanding to get them bone-smooth, and then I glaze them - or not. Much of my work is unglazed: I love the bonelike quality of unglazed porcelain. Then I fire them a second time to 1280 degrees celcius and I wait for the kiln to cool down enough to open, which takes 16 hours. Opening the kiln is the best part of the process - it is always exciting, and I’m always nervous. Pieces still explode and experiments often fail. But when I see a shelf of finished beads or vessels in the kiln, pure white and vitrified, like glass fossils, it is worth the work and the gamble.

I enjoy making very much. I hope you enjoy looking. Xxxxx