The vessel and the artist undergo the same event.

When I bring a hand-formed clay vessel into the field — to the shoreline, the woodland, the stream — it is not a recording device. It is a companion body. The wave that strikes my legs strikes the clay. What the work holds is not my interpretation of an encounter but the material record of one we shared. I call this Autobiographical Objecthood: the vessel develops a parallel biography to the artist through co-presence, not representation.

The unpote — from un pote, a companion, and from the biological state of potentiation, of becoming — enters each encounter unformed and uncommitted, shaped by what acts upon it. As I am. The object is not a symbol of experience. It is a co-witness to it.

This framework runs through the full lifespan of each piece. Firing is not an endpoint but a phase shift — the vessel continues to develop through the environments it enters, through breakage, through repair, through the hands that hold it long after it leaves mine. A piece I consider finished is better understood as mid-act. If it breaks in your home, it comes back to me. We continue its life together.

Current work under this framework includes vessels formed across tidal cycles on the Sussex coast, figurines shaped through the postnatal body and marked by intergenerational touch, and a land and garden unpote currently in development at a storied Arts & Crafts estate in Sussex, exploring what a cultivated landscape leaves behind in clay. Each project asks the same question from a different place: what does it mean for an object to have lived?